A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings

New Lectures and Writings by

JOHN CAGE

WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS Middletown, Connecticut

Copyright © 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967 by John Cage

To us and all those who hate us, that the U.S.A. may become just another

Some of these lectures and articles have been delivered or published elsewhere. The headnote preceding each one makes grateful acknowledgement of its precise source.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number : 67-24105 Manufactured in the United States of America First edition

part of the world, no more, no less.

CONTENTS FOREWORD: DIARY:

ix

HOW TO IMPROVE THE WORLD (YOU WILL ONLY MAKE MATTERS WORSE) DIARY:

1965:

3

EMMA LAKE MUSIC WORKSHOP 1965: SERIOUSLY COMMA:

26

HAPPY NEW EARS!:

30

TWO STATEMENTS ON IVES: MOSAIC: DIARY: DIARY:

36

43

AUDIENCE 1966:

50

HOW TO IMPROVE THE WORLD (YOU WILL ONLY MAKE MATTERS WORSE) 26

CONTINUED 1966:

52

STATEMENTS RE DUCHAMP:

JASPER JOHNS:

70

STORIES AND IDEAS:

MIRO IN THE THIRD PERSON: NAM J U N E PAIK:

A DIARY:

JUILLIARD LECTURE:

RHYTHM ETC.:

85

89 91

95

LECTURE ON COMMITMENT:

112

120

HOW TO PASS, KICK, FALL, AND RUN: TALK i:

73

8 STATEMENTS:

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?:

DIARY:

21

133

141

HOW TO IMPROVE THE WORLD (YOU WILL ONLY MAKE MATTERS WORSE)

CONTINUED 1967: AFTERWORD:

163

145

FOREWORD L When Silence was published, I gave a copy to David Tudor. After looking it over, he said, "Too bad the Jmiliard Lecture isn't in it." That text is included in this collection which, except for the Lecture on Commitment, written while Silence was in preparation, and many of the stories found here and there in this book and those brought together under the title How to Pass, Kick, Fall, and Run, consists of what I have been writing since 1961. The question is: Is my thought changing? It is and it isn't. One evening after dinner I was telling friends that I was now concerned with improving the world. One of them said: I thought you always were. I then explained that I believe—and am acting upon—Marshall McLuhan's statement that we have through electronic technology produced an extension of our brains to the world formerly outside of us. To me that means that the disciplines, gradual and sudden (principally Oriental), formerly practiced by individuals to pacify their minds, bringing them into accord with ultimate reality, must now be practiced socially—that is, not just inside our heads, but outside of them, in the world, where our central nervous system effectively now is. This has brought it about that the work and thought of Buckminster Fuller is of prime importance to me. He more than any other to my knowledge sees the world situation—all of it—clearly and has fully reasoned projects for turning our attention away from "killingry" toward "livingry." However, when I recently reread my Juilliard Lecture, I was struck by correspondences between the thought in it and the thought I consider most recent in my mind, e.g., "We are getting rid of ownership, substituting use," 1966; and "Our poetry now is the realization that we possess nothing," 1952. My ideas certainly started in the field of music. And that field, so to speak, is child's play. (We may have learned, it is true, in those idyllic days, things it behooves us now to recall.) Our proper work now if we love mankind and the world we live in is revolution. The reason I am less and less interested in music is not only that I find environmental sounds and noises more useful aesthetically than the sounds produced by the world's musical cultures, but that, when you get right down to it, a composer is simply someone who tells other people what to do. I find this an unattractive way of getting things done. I'd like our activities to be more social

ix

A

YEAR

FROM

MONDAY

and anarchically so. As a matter of fact, even in the field of music, this is what is happening. Already in the '50's we had the Once Group in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and the Gutai Group in Osaka and Tokyo. Now as one travels around he encounters groups so to speak wherever he goes: the Zaj Group in Madrid, 3

Fluxus here and abroad, Bang in Richmond, Virginia, the construction in Stockholm of the Hon by Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely, and Per Olof Ultvedt. When he comes back to New York City, he finds himself in the thick of a group of artists and engineers giving a Festival of Theater and Engineering, a group that plans, under the name E A T (Experiments in Art and Technology), to stay together, as families used to but rarely any longer do. We have moved, one may say, from the time of the family reunion to the present time that brings people and their energies and the world's material resources, energies, and facilities together in a way that welcomes the stranger and discovery and takes advantage of synergy, an energy greater than the sum of the several energies had they not been brought together. Coming back to the notion that my thought is changing. Say it isn't. One thing, however, that keeps it moving is that I'm continually finding new teachers with whom I study. I had studied with Richard Buhlig, Henry Cowell, Arnold Schoenberg, Daisetz Suzuki, Guy Nearing. Now I'm studying with N. O. Brown, Marshall McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller, Marcel Duchamp. In connection with my current studies with Duchamp, it turns out I'm a pooFchessplayer. My mind seems in some respect lacking, so that I make obviously stupid moves. I do not for a moment doubt that this lack of intelligence affects my music and thinking generally. However, I have a redeeming quality: I was gifted with a sunny disposition. About this book's title (apart from its ambiguity and my interest in nonmeasurement) : it was a Saturday; there were six of us having dinner in a restaurant on the Hudson north of Newburgh; we arranged to meet in Mexico (I've never been in other parts of Mexico than Lower California); three had been in Mexico and were delighted at the prospect of returning; one was born there but hadn't been there for five years; his wife, whom he married in India, like me has never been there; two others, not present at the dinner, both of whom have been in Mexico and love it, hopefully will join us; we may be a party of eight); in order to realize this rendezvous, all of us (knowing how to say Yes) will have to learn to say No—No, that is, to anything that may come between us and the realization of our plan. — J . C.

X

This text was written for publication by Clark Coolidge in his magazine Joglars, Providence, R.I. (Vol. 1, No. 3, 1966). It is a mosaic of ideas, statements, words, and stories. It is also a diary. For each day, I determined by chance operations how many parts of the mosaic I would write and how many words there would be in each. The number of words per day was to equal, or, by the last statement written, to exceed one hundred words. Since Coolidge's magazine was printed by photo-offset from typescripts, I used an IBM Selectric typewriter to print my text. I used twelve different type faces, letting chance operations determine which face would be used for which statement. So, too, the left marginations were determined, the right marginations being the result of not hyphenating words and at the same time keeping the number of characters per line forty-three or less. The present typography follows the original chance-determined plan. I have several times given this text as a lecture, first at Beloit College in Wisconsin, more recently (June 1966) at the International Design Conference in Aspen, Colorado. It was thereafter reprinted in the spring 1967 issue of Aspen Magazine.

DIARY: HOW TO IMPROVE THE WORLD (YOU WILL ONLY MAKE MATTERS WORSE) 1965 I.

Continue; I'll discover where you sweat (Kierkegaard).

We are getting

rid of ownership, substituting use. Beginning with ideas. take? Disappearance

Which ones can we Which ones can we give?

of power politics. measurement.

NonJapanese, he said: we

also hear with our feet. Busoni: Standing between musician and music is notation.

"Before I'd given the

history: chance operations, indeterminacy. I'd cited the musics of India: notation of them's after the fact.

I'd spoken of

3

I'd Quoted

FULLER: AS LONG AS O N E H U M A N BEING IS

direct musical action (since it's ears, not interposing eyes). 2:00 A. M . ,

HUNGRY, THE ENTIRE H U M A N RACE IS

HUNGRY.

Jensen said, "Even if you didn't like

C i t y pkmning's obsolete.

the results (Lindsay, etc.), we hope you liked the telling of it." (?) of it! happening!

m a y stop stepping like octopus on its

Telling

own feet.

We were there while it was

//.

Minimum

ethic: Do what

jnventory of world resources.

facing in its direction. Self-knowledge. with or without L S D .

A p r i l '64: U . S .

We

Canadian lake, stars in midnight sky repeated in water, forested shores precisely mirrored.

Our hearing's

asymmetrical: noticed sounds surprise us, echoes of shouts we make transform our

M o u n t a i n range d i v i d i n g Oahu, formerly

• voices, straight line of sound from us to

crenelated (crenelations for self-

shore's followed by echo's slithering

protection while shooting arrows), population

The seasons (creation, preserva^«n^

AS McLUHAN SAYS*, * IMAGE IS

N O LONGER STREAM FALLING OVER ROCKS, GETTING FROM ORIGINAL TO FINAL PLACE; IT'S AS TENNEY EXPLAINED: A VIBRATING COMPLEX, A N Y ADDITION OR SUBTRACTION POSITION(S) IN THE TOTAL SYSTEM, PRODUCING ALTERATION, A DIFFERENT MUSIC.

When I

(September '65), "Ifi-.now sixty-one."

work equals increasing number of

OF COMPONENT(S), REGARDLESS OF APPARENT

around the lake's perimeter.

California Bell Jelephone man replied

Social

EVERYTHING HAPPENS AT ONCE.

I

said, "7ifty-five global services,"

W a r s etc. part of d y i n g

III.

IV.

:

services which are global i n extent.

global services.

Pray

see symmetrically canoe on northern

State D e p a r t m e n t man gave H o n o l u l u talk—"global village whether we like i t or not"—, cited fifty-five

political-economic structures.

Some w i l l make it,

The others?

failures, no water to drink.

Instead they're

cooperative down there, exchanging

circulation.

Utopia?

for acts of G o d , crises, power

gambling on daily outcome: proceeds for

is now tunneled, permitting

Conversion:

the mind turns around, no longer

nature and all that), they should do it in the Antarctic, rest of us world welfare.

Buckminster Fuller uses his

h e a d : comprehensive design science;

you said you'd do. Impossible? Telephone. No answer? M y idea was that if they wanted to fight (human

data, being friendly.

What's

needed is g l o b a l planning so Earth

destruction, quiescence): this was experience and resultant idea (no longer is: he flies to R i o ) . we wear as we travel about?

What shall A summer suit

with or without long underwear?

What

about Stein's idea: People are the way their land and air is?

V. W h e n I said that culture was changing from

Renaissance to what it is now ( M c L u h a n ) , Johns objected to what he said was a n oversimplification.

But Johns was

Hugh Nibley.

I hadn't seen him since

high school days. he thought about other planets and

speaking according to our non-

sentient populations.

Yes, he said,

Renaissance experience: total field, non-

throughout the universe: it's Mormon

focused multiplicity.

doctrine.

We are, are we not,

We'd said good-bye.

socially speaking, in a situation of

attache' case and everything in it fell

For the old—paying bills,

out on the grass and the gutter.

seeking for power—take the attitude of play: games.

happens.

isn't necessary, "moving sand from one

Things we were going to do are

now being done by others.

part of the beach to another"

or they out of our minds?) but simply ready to enter any open mind, any mind

(It

disturbed enough not to have an idea in

celebrates.) The people have left.

it.

The cat and kittens were taken to the The house is full of

fleas.

indeterminate music sound the same. visited Hamada.

Getting up from

Earth does in response to Sun. Measurements, he said, measure measuring means.

Art's in

The leaf of some unknown tree sticking

7he land around

on the mushroom (Blythe).

that needs to remain unrevealed. Sung.

(Takemitsu).

Project: Discover way to

translate Far Eastern texts so western men

Rain, curtain oj wind-

swept lake's surface beyond: second view

can read orientally.

(there are others, he tells me, one with

Communication?

yesterday it was stillness An

polymorphic.

American garden, water, not sand,

Words

vegetation, not stones. Jhunder. Salt Lake.

He wanted me to agree that

the piano tuner and the piano maker have nothing to do with it (the composition).

Without intending to, I'm going from lake Saltair.

Bakarashi!

without syntax, each word

and reflections, groups oj bubbles.

to lake.

Mushroom does

not know that leaf is sticking on it

rests upon it obscuring its shape, shape

mists rising).

Basho: Matsutake ya

shiranu ko no ha no hebaritsuku.

process of coming into its own: life.

"Jloating world."

The daily warmth we

transmitted by Sun to Earth but is what I

the wheel, he said, "I'm not interested in results; just going on.

VIII.

experience, my father said, is not

VI.

They say totally determined music and

7he lake is undefined.

They were, it

seems, not in our minds to do (were we

(Buckminster Fuller)—take the

SPCA.

His

comment: Something memorable always

For the new—doing what

religious attitude: cerebration.

I opened

the door of the car, picked up my

the old dying and the new coming into being?

I asked him what

The younger ones had said: Whoever makes VII.

the stretcher isn't separate from the

painting. IX.

either.)

(It doesn't stop there

XI.

ELECTRONICS.

LOOKING IN ALL DIRECTIONS

NOT JUST O N E DIRECTION.

Housing

die.

longer exist.

living there: someone's there already desire emptiness.

individually.

4:00 Whether

and simple, individually conceived.

Advertisements are

Curiosity, awareness.

all good; the news is all bad (McLuhan).

their devotion to money rather than music.

we're glad to hear unemployment's

W h e n I spoke of the equation, work

Soon, all that will be

equals money equals virtue, they

required of us will be one hour's

things are?

7hey ask what

Is that how

saying, " H o w c a n y o u speak of money and virtue i n the same breath?"

artists and one purpose, would one

HAVE FAITH SPACE IS THERE, GIVING O N E

Areata Bottom sign

THE C H A N C E TO RENOVATE HIS W A Y OF

said: Experiment endlessly and keep

RECOGNIZING IT, N O MATTER THE MEANS,

" W r i t e to Center for the S t u d y

PSYCHIC, SOMATIC, OR MEANS

of Democratic Institutions; t h e y ' l l know about the global services."

I

suggested w r i t i n g to State

j People still ask for definitions, but

paperback.

N o w they're a l l out i n

Society's changing.

Relevant information's h a r d to come Soon i t ' l l be everywhere, unnoticed.

8

it's quite clear now that nothing

Department.

B o o k s one formerly needed were h a r d to

by.

INVOLVING EXTENSIONS OF EITHER.

T h e y answered they knew nothing,

locate.

WHERE

K N O W WE N O LONGER K N O W W H A T SPACE IS.

hundred and ninety-nine others be

did.

XII,

THERE DOESN'T SEEM TO BE A N Y SPACE,

artist be having it and all the nine

humble.

interrupted me (they didn't let me say that n o w a d a y s there's no equation),

Say there were a thousand

missing the point?

They returned to

the fact we a l l need to eat to explain

But how we receive bad news can change:

the purpose of art is.

War will not be

group conflict: it'll be murder, pure

we like it or not (is what he said)

X

Now we must do it

together: globally.

P. M . throughout the world.

work per year (Fuller).

You and it no

We had the chance to do it

"This is mine," we'll want when we

increasing.

Your

longer have a means of separation.)

Not being able to say,

it's happening to us.

(Sleep whenever.

work goes on being done.

Thus we'll learn to

inquire to get no response at all.

Earth.

O l d reasons for doing things no

Only circumstance to stop your (it's busy).

Jhere's less and less to do-,

circumstances do it for us.

(Fuller) will be, like telephoning, a service.

D a y comes, the d a y we

can be defined. purpose etc.

Let alone art, its

We're not even sure of

carrots (whether they're what we think they are, how poisonous they are, who grew them and under what circumstances). SHE WAS INDIGNANT WHEN I SUGGESTED

9

THE USE OF A N APHRODISIAC.

WHY?

that'll tell you things are going well is

NATURALLY SHE CONSIDERS TV A WASTE OF

TIME.

XIII.

that you and everyone else you know will

The purpose of one

be inhabiting lightweight Dymaxion

activity is no longer separate from the purpose of any other activity.

houses, disengaged from ownership and

All

from violated Earth spot (read

activities fuse in one purpose which

Fuller).

is (cf. Huang-Po Doctrine of Universal Mind) no purpose.

Imitate the

Ganges' sands, becoming indifferent to

Distractions?

entranced with emotions, purposes,

people to be inactive.

As Satie said:

If I don't smoke, someone else will in active passivity.)

Audience participation, XIV.

Since the

Spirit's omnipresent, there's a difference in things but no difference in spirit. M c L u h a n was able to say "The medium is the message" because he started from no concern with content.

O r choose

quantity, not quality (we get quality willy-nilly) : i.e. we'd like

of the opinion that the only thing

to stay alive, the changes that are

measurement of relations between things? When told that his mind could change, his response was, '"How?

quickly.

won't be between people a n d people b u t I n this

conflict let's t r y to arrange matters so the outcome as i n philosophy w i l l never be decisive.

T r e a t redwoods, for

instance, as entities that have at least a chance to w i n .

XVI.

He

wanders through markets as though they were forests and he an exploring botanist (throws nothing away).

Composition'll have, he Things happen more

One of the signs you'll get

10

Conflict

Lake.

Take what you're working on with

said, less and less to do with what happens.

Why?"

between people a n d things.

taking place are so many and so interesting.

Because he was

that will engage the intellect is the

(The inability of

my place.

Why was he so stupid?

We extended nervous

Agenbite of Outwit

(Location, Spring '63).

Jie was a physicist and a computer-composer in his spare time.

We've invented something else, McLuhan:

cross-legged in the lotus position. Phonetics.

mystified by living in the twentieth

systems.

That

way you needn't bother about sitting

Narcissi, they became

not the wheel.

Welcome

They give you the chance to

know whether you're disciplined.

Sick ones now are heartsick.

century.

Interruptions? them.

Where does it come from?

Responsibility?

Smiling, she said, let

much to be done about them in any case.

perfume, indifferent to filth. Influence.

XV.

the old ones walk out: there's not

you, if, that is, you have something to do.

Gaps.

What a pity

that she should feel obliged to take matters in her own hands!

11

(There's

practically no kitchen, he says, and

on the ceiling.

it's already been figured out that money's being saved.) Mexico.

h i m too.

interest.

Fusion of credit card with

passport.

Europeans are still up against it. They seem to require a center of

E n d of the month?

They understand tragedy but

That too may be what season it is, whether it's night or day.

We're starved for entertainment (thanking the two women).

By

but take i t . "

becoming angry I simply altered my

lunch.)

What'll we do?

"Wing it." it?

Qoing Music as

( D i a l o g u e is

another matter.)

Iben all's

Wo principles (which

doesn't mean we fail to become and then.

encounter whether they've any I ' l l write to F u l l e r .

We swim, drowning now

I must write and tell him

Lindsay: Take note).

XVIII.

Amateur (used to

say, "Don't touch it!") now speaks of audience participation, feels something, anything, is needed, would help.

Develop

WHAT'LL

panopticity of mind (Listen).

HAPPEN WHEN INTELLIGENCE IS RECOGNIZED

about beauty, the urgency to avoid it.

( M c L u h a n hadn't a n y . ) S h o u l d have done

that i n the first place ( P o p e P a u l ,

their saying N o (they advertise t h e y ' l l Principles?

T i m e passing, I ' l l ask those I information.

Acts a n d facts.

S t r a w t h a t breaks the camel's back:

So7

Hearing of past actions

AS A GLOBAL RESOURCE (FULLER)? POLITICAL ORGANIZATIONS-GIVING UP

(politics, economics), people soon

INVOLVEMENT WITH PLAY (PARTNERS,

won't be able to imagine how such

OPPONENTS), INVOLVEMENT WITH UNATTAINABLE

things could've happened.

Fusing

politics with economics prepared disappearance of both. invisible.

Still

A r r i v i n g , realizing we

never departed.

12

I'll

the Secretary ( o f State of the U . S . ) . If

y o u ' r e g o i n g to have a discussion,

furious).

L o n g costly correspondences?

write to the President ( o f the U . S . ) , to

discourse (jazz) doesn't w o r k .

intolerable.

W a n t i n g list of

( P e n t a g o n advises t e l e p h o n i n g . )

in different directions we get instead of separation a sense of space.

XIX.

" T a k e it easy,

(Before

current g l o b a l services, h o w ' l l I get

Meanwhile circumstances

continued characterized by habit.

In any case, no bills,

just added information. XVII.

biochemistry, bringing about a two-hour

say Y e s ) .

refusal to honor credit card.

changed: the measurement of time,

puzzles them, seems unsatisfactory.

have it and use words.

Means of making one's voice heard:

life itself (and any art that's like it)

recovery.

Seeing them, noticed

He mentioned heads

GOALS (VICTORIES, TRUTHS, FREEDOMS)—WILL SIMPLY FADE OUT OF THE PICTURE.

IMAGE C O M I N G UP IS THAT OF

THE UTILITIES (GAS, ELECTRICITY, TELEPHONES): UNQUESTIONABLE, EMOTIONALLY

13

UNAROUSING. XX. What is a drawing? No one knows any longer. Something that doesn't require that you wait while you're making it for it to dry?

Art.

Something on paper? Museum director said (Tobey, Schwitters), "It's a question of emphasis." Thanksgiving. Transportation plan (eventually at no

monetary cost, conveyances recognized for what they are: extensions of each human being and his luggage): short distances costly (to taxi for one block is a luxury), long trips cheap as dirt (crossing continents, oceans). Effect of videophone on travel?

That we'll

spoke of risk.

But what's meant by risk? Lose something? Principles?

principles is to examine them, to give them an airing.

Heaven's a motel.

She changed part of the loft: wall-to-wall carpeting, mobile T V .

N o conflicts.

Twenty-two telephone calls were made by Betty Zeiger "disrupting efficiency of federal agencies . . . dedicated to pursuit of peace."

State Department

said H a w a i i speaker was a w o m a n .

mere provision of food/shelter."

Everywhere

technological services.

Jake taxi tolls between cities.

Those

"Literary Villages" (plan for the betterment of life in India).

in one town higher than those in the other. Driver going from one to the other must drive home alone. Relaxation

packages of leaking water."

"We are "The next

water you drink may be your own." XXIII.

of rules, ties (Jake marriage), is

LET'S CALL IT THE

COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS (WE'VE G O T

N o w that we've got the

THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS).

four-lane roads, we won't have any use for

EVERYONE NEEDS REGARDLESS OF LIKES

Since

time lags were inordinately long, change's now welcome. Advertising's discredited itself. When they advertise something, we avoid it. There's nothing we really need to do that isn't dangerous. Eighth Street artists knew this years ago: constantly

AND

DISLIKES?

BEGINNING OF ANSWER:

WATER, FOOD, SHELTER, CLOTHING, ELECTRICITY, AUDIO-VISUAL COMMUNICATION, TRANSPORTATION. OF ANSWER: GLOBAL UTILITIES NETWORK.

not fear that as the globe gets utility organized your daily life will not remain (or become as the case may be)

14

THE

QUESTION IS: WHAT ARE THE THINGS

(Good for roller-skating, he said.) Refuse value judgments.

Not

State Department:

Global village developed from

(everywhere?), policy is dog eat dog.

them.

Heaven's no

are i n area of humanities "beyond

where economics and policitics obtain

indicated.

XXII.

longer paved w i t h gold (changes i n church architecture).

impressions we'll give of being XXI.

The way to lose our

Fifty-five ( n o w sixty-one) g l o b a l services

stay home, settling like gods for everywhere at once?

Property, life?

15

Do

FORM

disorganized, characterized by chaos, illuminated anarchically. have nothing to do; so what will you do?

emergency signals, meteorological

You'll

information, frequencies and powers of stations, means to prevent

A lifelong university (Fuller) ?

static.

I n the l o b b y after L a

M o n t e Y o u n g ' s music stopped,

papers, no exchanged radio programs, no

womb; now t h a t I ' m out, I w a n t to get

static-free radio reception, no

I felt differently a n d so d i d

meteorological prognoses, no storm

Jasper J o h n s : we were relieved to be released. XXIV. Knowing-seeing, conforming with reality. Anscombe's a feminist, insists on wearing pants. Obliged to lecture dressed in a dress, she took one with her, changed into it, lectured, changed back, walked home (teaching all the time) in

warnings, no security at sea, in air." Xliiver reports-. ITU (International Telecommunication Union) was established in i865 (nine years older than VW—post—and seventeen older than railroad agreements). X X V I . The truth is that everything causes

pants. As was said, "When will you undress yourself of your ideas?" No

everything else.

W e do not speak therefore

escape. Billy Klüver said decision of judge in South America (e.g.) is taken as precedent by judge in Sweden. Brown's work (Life Against Death) is prophetic (also de Kooning's remark: we no

are no secrets.

It's just we thought they

of one thing causing another. said dead when they said bread. transmission took place.

the arts.

IN LOVE.

CORRECT DEDUCTION: SHE IS

Klüver: I T U lists many

telegrams, telephones, radio, television,

Society has tape

recorders, r a d i o broadcasts, a n d also copyright laws ( w h i c h i t considers extending ) .

( Gets i n its own way.) copyright).

We're making

nonspecialist interpenetrations. Automation.

Alteration of global

society through electronics so that world w i l l go round b y means of united intelligence rather than b y means of divisive intelligence (politics.

16

Get

r i d o f copyright (this text is SHE

SAYS LIFE IS LIKE A BLANK WALL,

international agreements re Morse code,

Being

N e w m a n emphasized the importance of

at billions, unlike Nehru, we must

IMPASSIBLE.

Or

told about global services, Barnett

society as a mass is what needs psychoanalysis. (Thus polymorphous perversity, necessity of Utopia.) Looking XXV.

There

that we weren't tuned in when

longer have tragedy; the situation an individual may be in is only pathetic):

treat them as one person.

(ITU asks.)

"No press-news, no pictures in the

Geldzahler s a i d : It's like being i n a back i n .

"How would it be if these

agreements didn't exist?"

17

economics).

television, instant newspapers, instant magazines and instant visual

Say this idea has no basis

in fact but arose through brushing of misinformation.

No sweat,

(the idea exists, is fact). Do not imagine there aren't many things

It arose XXVII.

to do. We need for instance an utterly wireless technology. Just as Fuller domes (dome within dome,

telephone service . . . the development of such global communications system would link people everywhere . . . for reorientation toward a 'one-world concept of mass communications in an era marked by the emergence of a universal language, a universal

translucent, plants between) will give impression of living in no home at

culture and a universal common

must move toward way things were before man began changing them:

art and life.

Fuller's life is art: comprehensive

prophecy at end of Tomkins profile of him editorially (New Yorker)

of practicality).

China who'd participate in a spirit Fuller's remarks

considered laughable in view of November blackout,

(We need another

one that'll suggest using our heads the XXVIII.

We've

poisoned our food, polluted our air and water, killed birds and cattle, eliminated forests, impoverished, eroded the earth.

We're unselfish,

skilful: we include in our acts to perform—we've had a rehearsal— the last one.

What would you call it?

Nirvana?

design science, inventory of world resources (if enough mined copper exists, re-use it, don't mine more: same with ideas). arranging.

"Not only was instant

universal voice communication forecast by David Sarnoff, but also instant

It'll be like living a painting by Johns: Stars and

lives the brushstrokes. "McLuhan-. Work's obsolete.

Why?

Work's partial

involvement in activity.

Activity is

now necessarily total involvement (cf.

,

work, of artists, work not involved in profit).

Why total involvement?

Electronics.

Why everything-at-once?

7he way we-things are.

yathabhutam.

Where there's a history of organization (art), introduce disorder. Where there's a history of disorganization (world society), introduce order.

These directives are

no more opposed to one another than

18

World needs

Stripes'll be utilities, our daily

blackout, one that isn't so pleasant, way Fuller uses his.)

Now let life obscure

the difference between life and art.

Fuller

eliminated. Subject: global network for electrical power (including

POPULATION.

Art's obscured the difference between

identification with nature in her manner of operation, complete mystery.

XXIX.

market.'"

all (outdoors), so all technology

19

mountan's opposed to spring weather.

"How can you believe this when you believe that?"

How can I not?

Long life. Mies van der Rohe said, "The least is the most." I agree with him completely. At the same time, what concerns me now is quantity.

When I got a letter from Jack Arends asking me to lecture at the Teachers College, I wrote back and said I'd be glad to, that all he had to do was let me know the date. He did. I then said to David Tudor, "The lecture is so soon that I don't think I'll be able to get all ninety stories written, in which case, now and then, I'll just keep my trap shut." He said, "That'll be a relief."

A very dirty composer was attempting to explain to a friend how dirty a person was whom he had recently met. He said, "He has dirt between his fingers the way you and I have between our toes."

A lady carrying many packages got on a Third Avenue bus. Before she was able to get to a seat, the bus lurched forward. The packages fell, several of them on a drunken bum who had been muttering to himself. Looking up at the lady blearily, he said, "Whashish?" The lady answered cheerfully, "Those are Christmas pressents, my good man; you know, it's Christmas." "Hell," he said, "thawashlashyear."

nothing more than a passage for food, producers of dung, fillers up of privies, for of them nothing else appears in the world nor is there any virtue in their work, for nothing of them remains but full privies." David Tudor said, "Perhaps they were good Buddhists."

M y grandmother was sometimes very deaf and at other times, particularly when someone was talking about her, not deaf at all. One Sunday she was sitting in the living room directly in front of the radio. She had a sermon turned on so loud that it could be heard for blocks around. And yet she was sound asleep and snoring. I tiptoed into the living room, hoping to get a manuscript that was on the piano and to get out again without waking her up. I almost did it. But just as I got to the door, the radio went off and Grandmother spoke sharply: "John, are you ready for the second coming of the Lord?"

Just before setting out for Saskatchewan to conduct a music workshop at Emma Lake in July 1965, I received a request from the editor of Canadian Art for an article having fifteen hundred words. Since I was busy with a number of projects, I was on the point of replying that I had no time, when I noticed that I would be at the workshop for fifteen days and that if I wrote one hundred words a day it wouldn't be too much for me and the magazine would get what it wanted. I then replied with a certain firmness telling the editor that I would only do this if he would accept my work in advance, not change it in any way typographically, and let me see and correct proof (I was still cross with the editors of the Kenyon Review because of the way they had treated my text on Schoenberg's Letters). Everything was agreed to, and when the proof came there was nothing in it to correct. However, when it was printed in the January 1966 issue, a headnote accompanied it which suggested the frame of mind a reader might have were he to enjoy my text. Explanatory notes followed. All of that material is here omitted. Instead of different type faces, I used parentheses and italics to distinguish one statement from another. I set the text in a single block like a paragraph of prose. Otherwise I used the mosaic-discipline of writing described in the note preceding Diary: How to Improve etc. 1965.

D I A R Y : E M M A L A K E MUSIC WORKSHOP The day after I finally won the Italian T V quiz on mushrooms, I received anonymously in the mail Volume II of a French book on mushrooms that had been published in Germany. I was studying it in a crowded streetcar going to downtown Milan. The lady next to me said, "What are you reading that for? That's finished."

August 15.

The role of the composer is other than it was.

David Tudor gives the impression of not being overly fond of mushrooms. But one night he had two helpings of morels and then finished the dish completely, including the juice. The next afternoon while he was shaving I read out loud the following quotation from Leonardo da Vinci: "Lo! Some there are who can call themselves

20

Teaching, too, is

no longer transmission of a body of useful information, but's conversation, alone, together, whether in a place appointed or not in that place, whether with those concerned or those unaware of what is being said.

"Elizabeth, it is a beautiful day. Let us take a walk. Perhaps we will find some mushrooms. If we do, we shall pluck them and eat them." Betsy Zogbaum asked Marian Powys Grey whether she knew the difference between mushrooms and toadstools. "I think I do. But consider, my dear, how dull life would be without a little uncertainty in it."

1965

idea to another as though we were hunters. Two-One.

Operator doesn't answer.

others leaving for a day.

We talk, moving from one

Christopher Lake Line Four Ring

Everyone who's coming's still coming,

(By music we mean sound; but what's time?

tainly not that something begins and ends.)

August 16.

Cer-

This is the day the

workshop opens, but due to circumstances—a concert in Saskatoon—it opened yesterday.

Tomorrow?

(Hunted mushrooms in muskeg nearby.

21

Got lost.)

(checked that fire was out).

Goal: walk in one direction.

cigarettes and wax paper.

Recognized path connecting two lakes.

larger one, passed by A manita virosa. reply!

9:00 heard horn.

D o n Reichert and Rick Shaller picked me up.

St. Ives denim, ham sandwiches and canoe. relationship of them: no sounds.)

Shouted.

Received

Friendship vs nature:

Cooked hydnums. Fifty

Gave reading.

Search

people, mostly artists.

pies, blueberry and saskatoon, still in the hospital.

H e ' d written a piece in one style and was fulfilling a commission

in another.

What did I think?

versity.

The land is

flat.

August 25.

fact of weekend?

recordings of his music, was struck by difference between sections, no transitions.

(The one-hundred-year project at

H o w excellent if it could remain so, the people

living underground, ready for daily amazement of coming to the surface!)

also: loss of mind, cabin destroyed by fire, Mrs. Kaldor hospitalized.

Hearing several

O.K.

Regina: artificial mountain (slides away), artificial lake (weeds grow over), uni-

did we leave ahead of time?

(The question remains unanswered.)

Shopped for moccasins.)

August 28.

That night

fugue.

Jeep.

Visiting the

leaving, and coming back; difference of directions; Mrs. Kaldor, who baked the

A t night, searchlights, shouts, horns.

Discussion:

Dog.

Lost

(Distinguished between sounds and

organized by Jack Sures, potter. D N R men. Helicopter.

Mushrooms.

had been a robbery.

Circumstances?

The distances to travel?

W e ' d gotten together and so could separate?

Why The H There

None of the paintings taken, only the coin collection.

Saskatchewan.

Suggested carrying this to extreme (Satie, McLuhan, newspaper): not bothering with cadences.

% Made no effort ("Unperformed work isn't finished.") towards

workshop concert.

Therefore it happened and skilfully: piano solos by Ted

Bourre, setting of Duncan poem (two voices—singing, speaking, two pianos and percussion) by Martin Bartlett. and myself also heard.

Music by Jack Behrens, Boyd McDonald,

(Having missed poetry-reading, heard recording of it.

Gerry Gilbert spoke of poetry as voice instead of words on page. human by nature.)

August 26.

taught nor what we study. society?

Art McKay.

Like a dance:

What we learn isn't what we're

We don't know we're learning.

Something about

That if what happens here (Emma Lake) happened there (New Y o r k

C i t y ) , such things as rights and riots, unexplained oriental wars wouldn't arise. Something about art?

That it's experience shared?

the experience before we have the art?

(Rock 'n Roll.

That we must have had Two couples servicing

north with amplifiers, loud-speakers, the ladies dressed in silver.)

Self-education.

[Seminar (last d a y ) : answered questions re graphic notation.]

Dining room

turned into dance-hall.

Lois Long, Esther Dam, Ralph Ferrara, and I were in the Haverstraw cemetery gathering Tricholoina personatum. A n elderly lady with a hat on, standing by while a man she was with was tending a grave, happened to notice us. She called out, asking what we were doing there. We said we were looking for mushrooms. Her voice rose slightly as she asked whether Lois Long's Volkswagen which was parked nearby belonged to one of us. The next thing she asked, her voice sharp-edged, was whether we had loved ones buried there. Hearing no one of us did, she spoke firmly and loudly. "Well, I don't like it; and I don't think any one else would like it. If the mushrooms grow here, let them!" Meanwhile the gentleman with her paid no attention. He just went on doing what he was doing. And we, walking dutifully toward the little car, passed by quantities of our favorite mushrooms, making not the slightest attempt to pick them. As we drove off the woman was yelling. "Get out!" she screamed, "get out and never come back!"

Peck says that if things are doing well in gardens, one can expect, in the woods, fields, and waste places, to find wild plants doing equally well.

August 27.

Cree Indians formerly found a fungus

underground, i n books called Indian Bread.

The Montreal Lake Indians I spoke

to, some of them on in years, had never heard of it. are no longer geometric: they're floral.

Authentic Indian designs

/ / they ask you to write some music and

tell you what to write, how long, etc. (a commission), do all they ask, I told him, and whatever else, besides, you can.

(Departures at all hours; people arriving,

24

One winter David Tudor and I were touring in the Middle West. From Cincinnati we drove to Yellow Springs to drum up an engagement for Merce Cunningham and his Dance Company. In this way we met the McGarys. Keith was teaching philosophy at Antioch College and Donna taught weaving and dancing. M y conversation with Keith McGary had no sooner begun than we discovered our mutual interest in mushrooms. I told him that I'd never seen the winter-growing Collybia velutipes. He opened the front door and, using a flashlight, showed me the plant growing in the snow from the roots of a nearby tree. He told me what difficulty he was having finding books about fungi. I gave him my copy of Hard which I'd brought along. This books deals especially with Ohio mushrooms. The next day I located two copies of the book in a second-hand bookstore in Columbus. I bought them both. Each winter I find the Collybia, the velvet footed, in quantity. How is it I didn't notice it during the winters before I met Keith McGary?

On Yap Island phosphorescent fungi are used as hair ornaments for moonlight dances.

25

The composer Andre Boucourechliev conducted an inquiry regarding attitudes toward Serial Music Today. I contributed the following article. It was published in Preuves (Paris) March 1966.

MUSIC'S N O T W A I T I N G , B U T SINGS F I N A L

DISSOLUTION

OF POLITICS-ECONOMICS SO THAT,

I N E X C H A N G E FOR,

SAY, O N E DAY'S WORK PER Y E A R , E A C H PERSON

GETS

PASSPORT-CREDIT-CARD (ACCESS TO W H A T G L O B A L - V I L -

SERIOUSLY C O M M A

One thing he said: "There is already enough of the unknown." D i d he think of it then as spice or vitamin, additional at any rate to something not it, something known? Knowing, as we do, gravity doesn't act, what shall we consider that we know?

L A G E - H U M A N - R A C E HAS TO OFFER).

Admitting that, no matter what, one thing follows another (Wolff: "becomes a melody"), that there's no space between activities (Variations III), one asserts that this isn't two-dimensional linear-fact (or multiplicity of such facts interrelated) but unbeginning, interminable field-fact. Space, miracle, then arises where there was none.

McLuhan insists on the newspaper front-page as the present existence type. Reading, we no longer read systematically (concluding each column, or even turning the page to conclude an article): we jump.

Invade areas where nothing's definite (areas—micro and macro— adjacent the one we know in). It won't sound like music—serial or electronic. It'll sound like what we hear when we're not hearing music, just hearing whatever wherever we happen to be. But to accomplish this our technological means must be constantly changing.

M c L u h a n (Gutenberg Galaxy, Understanding Media) again: That printing

T H E Y SAID ONE THING INVOLVING

(alphabet: making b follow a inflexibly) made the Renaissance is evident.

/ asked him what a musical score is now.

SYMBOLS

Electronics equally is making us.

He said that's a good question.

SHIPS

I said: Is it a fixed relationship of parts?

T H E Y DIDN'T UNDERSTAND.

He said: Of course not; that would be insulting.

T H E N T H E Y SAID SOMETHING E L S E

LINEAR

WHICH M A D E

RELATIONM E THINK BUT

T H A T T H E SCHOOL'S DAYS OF BEING O P E N WOULD BE U N P R E SHE S P E N D S H E R DICTABLY ARRANGED. T H E R E S U L T TIME

COUNTING WAS W E HAD A P L E A S A N T DAY

T H E PASSING CARS. TOGETHER.

26

27

Complaint: you open doors; what we want to know is which ones you close. (Doors I open close automatically after I go through.)

The thing that's so offensive about the series is the notion that it is the principle from which all happenings flow (it would be perfectly acceptable for a series to enter into a field situation). But the prediction of series equals harmony equals mind of

(Fish)

Species, separated

and labeled, isn't what

an aquarium is now. It's a large glass water-house with unidentified fish freely swimming. Observation— Discovery.

A t present, it appears to be a series of components—a soundsystem—but it is a series of components, not a series of components. Soon 'twill be done wirelessly; then it won't appear to be different than what it already essentially is: not a series of components.

man (unchanged, used as obstacle, not as fluent component open at both ends)!

Privilege of connecting two things remains privilege of each individual (e.g.: / : thirsty: drink a glass of water); but this privilege isn't to be exercised publicly except in emergencies (there are no aesthetic emergencies).

It's no longer a question of people led by someone who assumes responsibility. It's as McLuhan says: a tribal situation. We need one another's help doing (food-gathering, art) what is to be done.

IT M U S T BE DONE IN A W A Y IT CANNOT BE TAUGHT ( H E SIMPLY HANDED M E A S P E C IMEN

AND WAS GENEROUS

E N O U G H TO SAY: IT IS EASY TO

IDENTIFY.

NOTHING

HE

SAID

I

THEN

ELSE.

NOTICED T H E OPPOSITE LEAVES

ARRANGED

ALTER-

N A T E L Y ON T H E S T E M A T

D e a l i n g with language ( w h i l e

RIGHT A N G L E S ) . IT REMAINS

waiting for something else than PERMISSION G R A N T E D . B U T N O T TO D O W H A T E V E R Y O U W A N T .

28

TO

syntax) as though it's a sound-

BE

SEEN

WHETHER

source that can be transformed

I'LL R E M E M B E R , HAVE T I M E

into gibberish.

TO DIG.

29

I have made two concert tours in Japan, one in 1962 with David Tudor, the other in 1964 with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Both of these visits were made possible by the Sogetsu Art Center, a lively organization which is part of the flowerarrangement school in Tokyo established by Sofu Teshigahara. It includes a studio for electronic music, a theatre for movies, concerts, and performances, halls for the exhibition of paintings and sculpture, and many offices where, at an instant's notice, tea, and even food, is served. The Sogetsu Art Center has many publications. For our tours elaborate programs were printed including texts. Written material in Japan is in great demand. The newspapers, magazines, and the radio constantly need it. In December of 1963 the Japanese Radio asked me to greet the music-lovers of Japan on the occasion of the New Year (and not to take more than a minute to do so). After some preliminary remarks, I wrote, "Music is music now if it is not interrupted by ambient sounds just as painting is painting now if it is not spoiled by the action of shadows. What is the crux of the matter as far as a listener is concerned? It is this: he has ears; let him use them.

objects in space; but, understood as a performance, it takes on the aspects of processes in time. I have for many years accepted, and I still do, the doctrine about Art, occidental and oriental, set forth by Ananda K . Coomaraswamy in his book The Transformation of Nature in Art, that the function of A r t is to imitate Nature in her manner of operation. Our understanding of "her manner of operation" changes according to advances in the sciences. These advances in this century have brought the term "space-time" into our vocabulary. Thus, the distinctions made above between the space and the time arts are at present an oversimplification. Observe that the enjoyment of a modern painting carries one's attention not to a center of interest but all over the canvas and not following any particular path. Each point on the canvas may be used as a beginning, continuing, or ending of one's observation of it. This is the case also with those works which are symmetrical, for then the observer's attention is made mobile by the rapidity with which he drops the

HAPPY NEW EARS!

problem of understanding structure. Whether or not a painting or sculpture lacks a center of interest may be determined by observing whether or not it is destroyed by the effects of shadows. (Intrusions of the environment are effects of time. But

(Ears are only part of his body: I wish the whole of him and all of you, whether you love music or not, Happy New Year! This Year and A l l Years!)" The texts which follow were my responses to two other requests, one written in advance of a visit, the other written in the air while flying east to San Francisco. They were translated into Japanese and published somewhere inside or outside the Sogetsu Art Center.

they are welcomed by a painting which makes no attempt to focus the observer's attention.) Observe also those works of painting, sculpture, and architecture which, employing transparent materials, become inseparable from their changing environments. The tardiness of music with respect to the arts just mentioned is its good fortune. It is able to make deductions from their experiences and to combine these with necessarily different experiences which arise from its special nature. First of all, then, a composer at this moment frees his music of a single overwhelming climax. Seeking an interpenetration and non-obstruction of sounds, he renounces

M a x Ernst, around 1950, speaking at the Arts Club on Eighth Street in New

harmony and its effect of fusing sounds in a fixed relationship. Giving up the notion

Y o r k City, said that significant changes in the arts formerly occurred every three

of hauptstimme,

hundred years, whereas now they take place every twenty minutes.

to one another only because they take place at the same time. If he maintains in

Such changes happen first in the arts which, like plants, are fixed to particular

his "counterpoints" are superimpositions, events that are related

his work aspects of structure, they are symmetrical in character, canonic or enjoy-

points in space: architecture, painting, and sculpture. They happen afterward in

ing an equal importance of parts, either those that are present at one instant, or

the performance arts, music and theatre, which require, as animals do, the passing

those that succeed one another in time. His music is not interrupted by the sounds

of time for their realization.

of the environment, and to make this a fact he either includes silences in his work

In literature, as with the myxomycetes and similar organisms which are classi-

or gives to his continuity the very nature of silence (absence of intention).

fied sometimes as plants and sometimes as animals, changes take place both early

. In addition, musicians, since they are several people rather than one person

and late. This art, if it is understood as printed material, has the characteristics of

as a painter or sculptor is, are now able to be independent each from another. A

30

31

composer writes at this moment indeterminately. The performers are no longer his

history records. We no longer have to lull ourselves expecting the advent of some

servants but are freemen. A composer writes parts but, leaving their relationship

one artist who will satisfy all our aesthetic needs. There will rather be an increase

unfixed, he writes no score. Sound sources are at a multiplicity of points in space

in the amount and kinds of art which will be both bewildering and productive of joy.

with respect to the audience so that each listener's experience is his own. The mobiles of modern sculpture come to mind, but the parts they have are not as free as those of a musical composition since they share a common suspension means

m>

m

w

and follow the law of gravity. In architecture, where labor is divided as it is in music, music's freedom is not yet to be observed. Pinned to the earth, a building

Last A p r i l in Hawaii, I asked Tohru Takemitsu what M a k i (his three-year-old

well made does not fall apart. Perhaps, though, when the dreams of Buckminster

daughter) thought of the United States. He said: She thinks it's another part of Japan.

Fuller become actualities, houses, for example, that are dropped from the air

Visiting Hamada in Machiko, I expected there, off the beaten track, to see things

instead of bombs, architecture, through flexible means unfamiliar to us now, will

specifically Japanese. Hamada showed pots, objects, and furniture from all over the

initiate a wholly new series of changes in the arts.

world—Spain, Mexico, China, Arizona. The situation music finds itself in in the

Changes in music precede equivalent ones in theatre, and changes in theatre precede general changes in the lives of people. Theatre is obligatory eventually be-

United States and Europe, it also finds itself in in Japan. We live in a global village (Buckminster Fuller, H . Marshall M c L u h a n ) . M a k i is right.

cause it resembles life more closely than the other arts do, requiring for its apprecia-

One of the things we nowadays know is that something that happens (anything)

tion the use of both eyes and ears, space and time. " A n ear alone is not a being." Thus,

can be experienced by means of technique (electronic) as some other (any other)

more and more, we encounter works of art, visual or audible, which are not strictly

thing (happening). F o r instance, people getting in and out of elevators and the

speaking either paintings or music. In New Y o r k City they are called "happenings."

elevators moving from one floor to another: this "information" can activate circuits

Just as shadows no longer destroy paintings, nor ambient sounds music, so environ-

that bring to our ears a concatenation of sounds (music). Perhaps you wouldn't

mental activities do not ruin a happening. They rather add to the fun of it. The

agree that what you heard was music. But in that case another transformation had

result, coming to the instance of daily life, is that our lives are not ruined by the

intervened: what you heard had set your mind to repeating the definitions of art and

interruptions that other people and things continually provide.

music that are found in out-of-date dictionaries. (Even if you didn't think it was

I have attempted briefly here to set forth a view of the arts which does not

music, you'd admit that you took it in through your ears, not through your eyes, nor

separate them from the rest of life, but rather confuses the difference between A r t

did you feel it with your hands or walk around inside it. Perhaps you did walk around

and Life, just as it diminishes the distinctions between space and time. Many of

inside it: the architecturality of music is now a technical possibility and a poetic fact.)

the ideas involved come from the Orient, particularly China and Japan. However,

If this elevator-originated music had been heard, what modern Japanese music

what with the printing press, the airplane, telegraphy, and nowadays Telstar, the

would it have been? Who among the following would have made this possibility an

distinctions between Occident and Orient are fast disappearing. We live in one

actuality (a music which we will soon hear whether we happen to be in Tokyo, New

world. Likewise the distinctions between self and other are being forgotten.

York, Berlin, or Bombay)? Yori-aki Matsudaira? Yuji Takahashi? Joji Yuasa?

Throughout the world people cooperate to effect an action. Hearing of anonymity,

Tohru Takemitsu? Takehisa Kosugi? Toshi Ichiyanagi?

one can imagine the absence of competition.

Toshi Ichiyanagi. During my recent visit to Japan I listened to tape recordings

Can anyone say how many artists will be born in the next twenty minutes?

of music by all the composers I mention except Kosugi. Kosugi's work I saw at Sogetsu

We are aware of the great changes taking place each instant in the numbers of

Art Center. (His music is taking the clothes of theatre and wearing them in a way

people on this planet. A n d we know of the equally great changes in practicality—

that redignifies both arts.) A n d in A p r i l at the East-West Center in Hawaii I was with

what, that is, through technology, people are able to do. Great numbers of men

Takemitsu. A l l these composers interest me, and more than European ones because

will bring about the future works of art. A n d these will go in more directions than

they give me more freedom to do my own listening. They don't use sound to push me

32

33

4

4

where I don't want to listen. However, they all connect themselves (their ideas, their feelings, the accident that they're Japanese) with the sounds they make. Except Ichiyanagi. Ichiyanagi has found several efficient ways to free his music from the impediment of his imagination. In a piece called Distance he requires the performers to climb above the audience to a net from which they activate instruments which are placed below on the theatre floor. This physical separation brings about an unusual playing technique that brings the sounds together in the natural way they are together whether in the fields, in the streets, or in the homes and buildings. In a string quartet called Nagaoka, Ichiyanagi requires the players to bow where they usually finger and finger where they normally bow. This is miraculous, producing a music that

lady who told me this had had a change of mind, or her particular flight had been postponed, I don't remember which. One way or another, she lost interest in Europe. Another, noticing fungi in Bavarian and Milanese markets, sent post cards.

Once when I was i n A n n A r b o r w i t h Alexander Smith, I said that one of the things I liked about botany was that it was free of the jealousies and selfish feelings that plague the arts, that I would for that reason, if for no other, given my life to live over again, be a botanist rather than a musician. He said, "That shows how little you know about botany." Later in the conversation I happened to mention the name of a mycologist connected with another Midwestern university. Incisively, Smith said, "Don't mention that man's name in my house."

When Colin McPhee found out that I was interested in mushrooms, he said, "If you find the morel next spring, call me up, even if you only find one. I'll drop everything, come out, and cook it." Spring came. I found two morels. I called Colin McPhee. He said, "You don't expect me, do you, to come all that way for two little mushrooms?"

does not make the air it is in any heavier than it already was. A n d with the assistance of Junosuke Okuyama (who if the L o r d knew His business would be multiplied and placed in every electronic music studio in the world) Ichiyanagi has made a number of useful works: Life Music, Mixture on Tinguely, Pratyahara. These pieces (I heard only the first two recently) are as outrageous and interminable as Buddhist services and meditations. But like other unpleasant things and experiences, they are good for us. Why? Because, if we don't pamper ourselves but actually put up with the experience of them, we find our ears and our lives changing, not in a way that obliges

There was an international conference of philosophers in Hawaii on the subject of Reality. For three days Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki said nothing. Finally the chairman turned to him and asked, "Dr. Suzuki, would you say this table around which we are sitting is real?" Suzuki raised his head and said Yes. The chairman asked in what sense Suzuki thought the table was real. Suzuki said, "In every sense."

Mr. Romanoff is sixty years old. Mr. Nearing is seventy years old. M r . Romanoff's mother is eighty-five. On one of the mushroom field trips, a photographer came who had been sent by The New York Times. We took the Stony Brook trail. We had no sooner gotten started than the photographer busied himself taking pictures. Soon Mr. Romanoff was not to be seen. M r . Nearing drew Lois Long aside and said, " M r . Romanoff has had an accident to his pants. Would you find out whether one of the ladies has a safety pin?" Lois Long complied. A very small safety pin was found, and Lois Long gave it to M r . Romanoff. He came back to the group. The safety pin, being so small, proved ineffective. M r . Romanoff nevertheless stayed with the group, and, as the walk continued, the split in his pants progressed until it was complete, crotch to cuff. We stopped for lunch at a spring. M r . Romanoff looked at his pants and said, " M y mother will hear about this."

us to go through Ichiyanagi (or Japan for that matter) to have our daily beauty but which fits us each moment (no matter where we live) to do our music ourselves. (I am speaking of nothing special, just an open ear and an open mind and the enjoyment of daily noises.) In this changing musical world Japan is no less centrally placed than any other country. Having the composers and technical assistance it has, it is more fortunately populated than most.

While hunting morels with Alexander Smith in the woods near Ann Arbor, I mentioned having found quantities of Lactarius deliciosus in the woods in northern Vermont. He said, "Were the stipes viscid?" I said, "Yes, they were." He said, "It's not deliciosus; it's thyinos." He went on to say that people go through their entire lives thinking that things are that when they are actually this, and that these mistakes are necessarily made with the very things with which they are the most familiar.

Music and mushrooms: two words next to one another in many dictionaries. Where did he write The Three-Penny Opera? Now he's buried below the grass at the foot of High Tor. Once the season changes from summer to fall, given sufficient rain, or just the mysterious dampness that's in the earth, mushrooms grow there, carrying on, I am sure, his business of working with sounds. That we have no ears to hear the music the spores shot off from basidia make obliges us to busy ourselves microphonically.

34

The first time the mushroom class was given at the New School, many people signed up for it. The registrar was. alarmed, telephoned me and asked, "Where shall we draw the line?" I said if more than forty people were involved it might be difficult. Something like that number registered for the course, but when the field trips actually took place, there were never more than twenty people in the woods. Sometimes attendance dropped to a mere dozen. I couldn't figure out what was happening. I forget who it was, but one day in the woods one of the lady students confessed that when she signed up for the course it was not with the intention of tramping through the woods near New York City, fungi or no fungi. She was interested in going to Europe. Some airplane company had advertised inexpensive roundtrip fares purchasable only by adults enrolled in the New School. People had studied the catalogue as though it were a menu, looking for the cheapest course regardless of what was being taught. The

Mr. Romanoff says the Sunday field trips are better than going to church. However, one Sunday he said, "I can't come next Sunday because it's Rosh Hashana, and I've arranged with my mother that if I stay home on Rosh Hashana, I'll be able to come on Y o m Kippur."

35

In April 1964 Michael O. Zahn of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, wrote asking what my view of Charles E. Ives and his music was. I replied, as below, in handwriting on stenographic notepaper, a supply of which I generally have around. I didn't keep a copy of this letter, but when M r . Zahn wrote to thank me his pleasure was such that I asked him to send me a Xerox. He did. Then in September 1965 Irving Glick, a producer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation who was making a documentary program about Ives, asked me to make a statement on the composer's influence and current relevance. I did this in the C B C New York studio. When it was played back, I was pleased with what I'd said, and so wrote to Mr. Glick asking for a transcript of the tape. When that arrived, I was not pleased at all: my remarks seemed awkward, not worth keeping around. Then I remembered a text in Explorations in Communication, a book edited by E . S. Carpenter and H . Marshall McLuhan. This text omitted punctuation, introducing space instead, giving the impression speech, not writing, does. In December of '66 I spent an hour with Keith Waldrop's class in poetry at Wesleyan University, and a general plan for speech presentation (in which uh's and mm's and other noises one involuntarily makes when he's forming his thoughts while speaking would be represented graphically, as would inflections and changes in volume) was developed with the aid of the students present. I've made no attempt, below, to graph pitch, emphasis, or changes of timbre. Breathing is indicated by triangles; swallowing appears as a series of descending circles; scribbles represent the uh's and other noises, some of which are attached to the ends of words. The way these statements are presented is an effect on me of the work of Marshall McLuhan who so dramatically has turned the attention of many to the influences of communication media on sense perceptions, and the work of Marcel Duchamp who just about fifty years ago called attention to the value of things to which value was not ordinarily attached, and who, on another C B C occasion, when he was asked by the interviewer what he was doing, said, "I breathe."

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In March of 1965 I received from the Kenyon Review a copy of Arnold Schoenberg Letters, selected and edited by Erwin Stein, translated from the original German by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser (St. Martin's Press, New Y o r k ) . I was informed that a book review by me would be welcome but that whether or not I wrote it I might keep the book. In May I visited Jasper Johns at Edisto Beach, spending much of my time writing the basis for the following text. I related all parts of the book (each letter, the jacket, the biographical notes, the table of contents, the several indexes) to the number 64, so that I could, by tossing coins following the I-Ching method of obtaining oracles, know which part of the book I was to discuss and how many words I was to use for that purpose. Previously, in order to write an article, I had been using the materials of Cartridge Music (see the note preceding Rhythm, Etc.). This had produced texts which included spaces without words. The need for a text without such spaces had first arisen when I confronted the canvases of Jasper Johns which were completely painted; this need arose again as I read and reread the Schoenberg Letters, a book which is closely compacted in every sense. The editors of the Kenyon Review published my text in the Summer 1965 issue, but with certain modifications which brought the review "more nearly into typographic conformity with the others." Then, for the present circumstance, I removed those statements which dealt with other parts of the book than the letters themselves, and wrote (October 1966) new ones to take their places.

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Schoenberg's words are those italicized. Quotations are remarks I recall he made when I was studying analysis and counterpoint with him.

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easier don't merely increase the difficulties. Berg, Schoenberg, Webern. Another punctuation clarifies the matter: Berg-Schoenberg; Webern. Now seriously . . . / . . .

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(. . . have only contempt for anyone who finds the slightest fault with anything I publish. One God. The questions he asked his pupils had answers he already knew.

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43

Answers his pupils gave didn't tally with his. Schoenberg needed to be sure of

establish a unified terminology and. . . relevant descriptions and definitions if one

himself, so that, when leading others, he might be ahead. " Y o u ' l l devote your life to

could begin by getting doctors to describe their own pains....

music?" He thought of letters as improvisations. They were not compositions.

a house because Strang, who lived there, had a cold. His students worshipped him.

Though he complained of the time his letters consumed, when he was forced to rest

So that when he said " M y purpose in teaching you is to make it impossible for you

he wrote them. We're chucking this idea too (even though Schoenberg had i t ) :

to write music," his words seemed helpful rather than devastating. Alban Berg.

that music enables one to live in a dream world removed from the situation one is

Before acting, he examined all the possibilities; aged seventy-six he left the

actually in (and so the eyes of the music lovers, closed or reading scores—fortunate

decisions to others. Think it over, and if you find it works, then do it. Troubled by

for them they're not crossing city streets). I explained to Stravinsky that studying

asthma and needing 5000 marks quickly, he lists three unpublished works, praises

with Schoenberg I had become a partisan: pro-Schoenberg, pro-chromaticism.

two, and discusses in connection with the third his feelings regarding praise, finding

Stravinsky: But I write chromatic music; my objection to Schoenberg's music: it

self-praise, though malodorous, preferable to that bestowed by others. Sitting in the

isn't modern (it's like Brahms). Schoenberg pointed out others' mistakes; aware

living-room after

of his own, he corrected them. Criticism is unnecessary. / disagree with almost

Schoenberg among them, were knitting. Schoenberg insisted, as long as he was

everything. Books he remembered were written by opponents. Musical conventions,

talking, that there be no further knitting. To him, being a real musician meant being

complexity, yes—but let no objects and settings for operas puzzle his audiences.

literate and having an ear educated by European music. The twelve-tone method

. . . it is much more interesting to have one's portrait done by or to own a painting

was intended to replace the functional qualities of tonal harmony. These functional

by a musician of my reputation than to be painted by some mere practitioner of

qualities are structural: dividing wholes into parts. Methods make contiguities.

painting whose name will be forgotten in 20 years, whereas even now (he was

Not having the means to make new structures (Hauer), nor the desire to renounce

thirty-five) my name belongs to history. Our values. Composition using twelve tones

structure (process), Schoenberg made structures neoclassically. Two years before

was in the Viennese air. Hauer and Schoenberg both picked it up. But differently.

he died, Vienna honored Schoenberg right and left, granting him free entry into

Simultaneously? / empower you to publish this letter . . .; but if. . . so, . . . in its

the city. This gave him pride and joy, singular pleasure, but reminded him too of his

entirety; not excerpted. What with his wretched financial situation, asthma, anti-

opponents, diminished though they were in number and power. His Harmonielehre

Semitic attacks from political quarters, lack of public recognition, etc., one's led

begins: "This book I learned from my pupils." But: a teacher's sole reward, he

(if not to agree) to listen when he says: This earth is a vale of tears and not a

said, was ascribing pupils' successes to himself. Anton Webern. Ruthless honesty.

place of entertainment. Experiencing music not composers' names: at the Private

For. . . all I want is to compose. Even the fact that I write so many letters is a

Concerts Schoenberg organized, members listened, not told what they were hearing

very harmful deviation from this principle. And though any one who means well by

or who'd composed it. Believing that truth existed, he was interested in knowing

me should certainly write to me as often as possible (for I'm always glad of that),

what it was. Analyzing a single measure of Beethoven, Schoenberg became a

it should be in such a way that I don't have to answer! He said she should leave the

magician (not rabbits out of a hat, but one musical idea after another: revelation).

room, that he would also, that those remaining would vote whether she might

Arnold Schoenberg. What becomes evident (and we knew it anyway) is that unless

continue in the class. Leaving after her, he said, smiling, "Be sure you keep her."

one is a comedian (and Schoenberg wasn't, though he played tennis at least once

Aggressiveness. He was a self-made aristocrat. / wonder what you'd say to the

with the Marx brothers) all's lost. One's intentions make life nearly unendurable.

world in which I nearly die of disgust. Becoming an American citizen didn't remove

A glass of brandy and .. . enjoyed it. Righteous indignation. It would be possible to

his distaste for democracy and that sort of thing. Of former times when a prince

44

45

He wouldn't enter

dinner, Schoenberg was talking. Some of the ladies, Mrs.

stood as a protector before an artist, he writes: The fairest, alas bygone, days of art.

music until you're sick to your stomach. Effective antidote: A n y Hauer piece you

Schoenberg treated his written sentences as though they were movies and he the

can lay your ears on. . . . you will. . . recall my declaring at the time that only if

film editor of a magazine: awarding to most no question marks or exclamation

were chucked out of the committee could I consider having anything

points at all, to others anywhere from one to four. H e underlined passages (italics

to do with this society. This was not done. . . . The society doesn't exist for me.

in the printed versions). Typing, he sometimes shifted to capitals, not shifting back

His view (music's not something we experience, but rather an idea we can have,

until his point had been made. Schoenberg asked a student to play the piece on the

the expression of which can never be perfect though we ought — for artistic and

piano. She said it was too difficult for her. "You're a pianist?" She agreed. "Then

moral reasons — to bring it as close to perfection as possible) is former and

go to the piano." O n the way, she said she would play slowly in order not to make

foreign. A t the age of seventy-two he wrote a charming letter to Dr. Perry Jones,

mistakes. He said, "Play at the proper tempo and do not make mistakes." She

president of the Los Angeles Tennis Organization, asking for advice about how to

began. H e stopped her: "You're making mistakes!" She began again. He stopped

proceed with tennis experience for his daughter, fifteen, and his son, ten. Lessons,

her: "You're not going fast enough!" After several tries, each of which he inter-

membership in a club? Invited as guest of honor to a party to be given two weeks

rupted, she burst into tears, explaining between sobs that she had been to the

thence, he refused (honored guests should be invited at least a month or six

dentist that morning and had had a tooth pulled out. Schoenberg: " D o you have

weeks in advance). To compose conscientiously didn't finish matters. A broadcast

to go to the dentist in order to make mistakes?" He considered independence of

of the piece with two cuts was a violation of his rights. Sending one letter but

mind praiseworthy. When questioned about his own work: "That's none of your

getting no reply, he wrote again, threatening legal action. To Alban Berg: I'd like

business." He asked Dehmel to write the text for an oratorio, giving him the subject

to know too if I can do anything for you in America: always supposing that I should

in detail and only one limitation:..

. 60 printed pages. As for living-quarters and

have the power, of course. For there's no knowing how disregarded, slighted, and

tennis, the fact is these two problems are for us very closely connected. He wanted

without influence 1 may be there. I always thought it was I who originated the

to get home easily after playing. It costs money, having to take a taxi: unless of

term 'emancipation of the dissonance.' N o time for time: having divided each 4 / 4

course one buys oneself a car! He considered using marble as a wall covering.

bar in half (conventions did what he had to do), he found there were too many

Works were left unfinished: particularly Moses and Aron and Die lacobsleiter. A n d

accents. His pupils did not think him arrogant when, as often, he said, "With this

the school he envisaged for Israel was never established; those who'd issue from

material Bach did so-and-so; Beethoven did so-and-so; Schoenberg did so-and-so."

it must be truly priests of art, approaching art in the same spirit of consecration

His musical mind, that is, was blindingly brilliant. Like most other composers,

as the priest approaches God's altar. Task of Israeli musicians? T o set the world

Schoenberg had more or less constant money problems. The thought arises whether

an example. He was capable of laying down the law. In counterpoint classes, the

these are not the true subject of music. Only one thing I should like to say at once:

laws he gave were no sooner followed than he demanded they be taken less

I would not let a new work have its first performance in Vienna. The fact is I am

seriously. Liberties taken, he'd ask: Why don't you follow the rules? He kept his

the only composer of any reputation at all whom the Philharmonic have not yet

students in a constant state of failure. He excused what he did, pointing out that he

performed. And it may as well rest at that! Very busy with teaching. Synonyms

had precedents (Beethoven, Mozart). Buckminister Fuller speaks of time-lags.

were not interchangeable: Schoenberg insisted on the right word. We don't yet know

Devotion to Webern precluded devotion to Schoenberg. Accepting composition with

whether we shall be in New York this winter. It's very expensive, and we can live

twelve notes meant paying no heed to the theories and works of Josef Matthias

on 2/5ths of the money in the South, and I can recuperate. Several letters suggest

Hauer. Plan: 1, Listen to Webern until you can't stand it; 2, Play Schoenberg's

Schoenberg felt closer to Berg and Kokoshka than to Webern and Kandinsky. The

46

I

47

other way around might have been more interesting. A little anonymity would have

listening. T o repeat: " T o improve international affairs, the thing to do is to develop

been somewhat refreshing. Schoenberg's letters exhibit his well-nigh absolute self-

foreign trade." Arnold Schoenberg. Each student trembled, knowing Schoenberg's

confidence— something he possessed early in life. Thinking of Lippold and

wit might at any moment hit in his direction. The story that goes around that he

Stockhausen, one runs to the common denominator: Germany. But Schoenberg was

forbade laughter isn't true. We're living 'under the sign of Traffic'. . . one has to

from Austria and not Aryan. He changed the books he read. Writing texts on

move on! His taste? Awestruck, students never asked: why the striped T-shirt? why

miscellaneous papers, he carefully folded them back to a size less than that of the

green and yellow stripes? why such heavy furniture sent from Europe to California?

book and inserted them neatly with paste. Publish the thickened Busoni Sketch!

why such furniture chosen in the first place? " H e was a complex man. . . . He

Everything, he said, is repetition. A variation, that is, is a repetition, some things

could be generous, aggressive, witty, sardonic, profound, courageous, charming,

changed and others not. Eventually a "Portrait of Schoenberg" by Kokoshka is a

sympathetic and suspicious." His situation in America improved. The Juilliard

self-portrait by Schoenberg, far-reaching, everything changed but the subject. To

School even offered him a teaching post. But his health required his living in the

observe, compare, define, describe, weigh, test, draw conclusions and use them.

South (Los Angeles! ! ! !). Not so bad either: in the midst of the depression, movie

Though I still think Shostakovich is a great talent. Turning musicologist, Satie, in

composers paid him $50.00 per hour for private lessons. My self-education. He was

one composition, refers the pianist to another piece which he never wrote. Reading

depressed by criticism because there were no limitations to his sense of responsibility.

a newspaper, Schoenberg noticed that Downes had altered the title of one of his

Though his experience was space-time, his idea of unity was two-dimensional: vertical

works. He wrote, correcting the error. Ordinarily, he insisted on a large number of

and horizontal. O n paper. The twelve-note system, the U . C . L . A . Retirement

rehearsals, but when informed that he could have as many as necessary he set about

System are different. How? The Schoenbergs (wife, three children) received $29.60

diminishing their number. Write soon, and don't be offended about this letter. . .

monthly. A n afternoon series of Beethoven-Schoenberg string quartet recitals was

Arnold Schoenberg. For Schoenberg, publishers, unlike critics, were a necessary

arranged at U . C . L . A . Schoenberg: "Music should be played at night, not in the

evil. It never occurred to him to do without them. It remained for Mrs. Schoenberg

afternoon." Studying English, late in life, Schoenberg made a few mistakes, later

to terrorize the musical world, permitting no printing of unpublished works, instead

becoming fluent. We'd all written fugues. H e said he was pleased with what we'd

providing the musical materials plus a bill for each performance. Stein: "Adler was

done. We couldn't believe our ears, divided up his pleasure between us. First

a friend of Schoenberg's youth, his first teacher"; "(Schoenberg) was self-taught."

afraid (each new person might be a Nazi), later delighted and grateful: someone

Though U . C . L . A . could no longer use him (he was too old), others called upon

was interested in his art.

him. The Burgomaster of Vienna summoned him back to Austria; Israel would have had him shape its Academy of Music. Too late. The great man was — it is true — on his last legs . . . face to face with the difficulties, problems, and inherent terms of the given material. Schonberg. Having heard of a "cutting

conspiracy,"

Schoenberg explained that that would not shorten a work: it would still be a long piece that was too short in various places (where it had been cut). He apparently thought that once he had made something, it should remain fixed for all time. Rigor mortis. A teacher, he realized — what administrators don't — that students surpassing the average might do so in only one subject. Craftsmanship. Repeated

48

rather than from winds and theirs, got a better start since the X-quantities involved were not so physically close to the results being predicted. The driver said he'd had an operation some years before and that while his flesh was dead and numb, before the wound healed, he was able to predict weather changes by the pain he felt in the scar, that when the flesh lost its numbness and was, so to speak, back to normal, he could no longer know in advance anything about changes in weather.

David Tudor and I took a taxi down town. He was going to Macy's; I was going on to West Broadway and Prince where I get my hair cut. After David Tudor got out, I began talking with the driver about the weather. The relative merits of the Old Farmers' Almanac and the newspapers came up. The driver said they were developing rockets that would raise the weather man's predictions from 50 to 55 per cent accuracy. I said I thought the Almanac starting from a consideration of planets and their movements,

49

This text was written on the highways while driving from an audience in Rochester, New York, to one in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Following the writing plan I had used for Diary: Emma Lake, I formulated in my mind while driving a statement having a given number of words. When it had jelled and I could repeat it, I drew up somewhere along the road, wrote it down, and then drove on. When I arrived in Philadelphia, the text was finished. It was used as my opening statement on a panel, The Changing Audience for the Changing Arts, May 21, 1966, at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City for the Arts Councils of America, which later that year changed its name to Associated Council of the Arts. The others on the panel were William Alfred, Elizabeth Hardwick, Stanley Kauffmann, John H . MacFadyen, and Richard Schechner. M y text was printed in The Arts: Planning for Changes, the title given to the published proceedings of the twelfth national conference of the A C A .

experience art? Audience participation? (Having nothing to do, we do it nonetheless; our biggest problem is finding scraps of time in which to get it done. Discovery. Awareness.) "Leave the beaten track. Y o u ' l l see something never seen before." After the first performance of my piece for twelve radios, Virgil Thomson said, "You can't do that sort of thing and expect people to pay for it." Separation. I V . When our time was given to physical labor, we needed a stiff upper lip and backbone. N o w that we're changing our minds, intent on things invisible, inaudible, we have other spineless virtues: flexibility, fluency. Dreams, daily events, everything gets to and through us. (Art, if you want a definition of it, is criminal action. It conforms to no rules. Not even its own. Anyone who experiences a work of art is as guilty as the artist. It is not a question of sharing the guilt. Each one of us gets all of it.) They asked me about theatres in New York. I said we could use them. They should be small for the audiences, the performing areas large and spacious, equipped for television broadcast for those who prefer staying at home. There should be a cafe in connection having food and drink, no music, facilities for playing chess. V . What happened at Rochester? We'd no sooner begun playing than the

D I A R Y : A U D I E N C E 1966

audience began. Began what? Costumes. Food. Rolls of toilet paper projected in streamers from the balcony through the air. Programs, too, folded, then flown. Music, perambulations, conversations. Began festivities. An audience can sit quietly

I. A r e we an audience for computer art? The answer's not N o ; it's Yes. What we

or make noises. People can whisper, talk and even shout. A n audience can sit still

need is a computer that isn't labor-saving but which increases the work for us to do,

or it can get up and move around. People are people, not plants. " D o you love the

that puns (this is McLuhan's idea) as well as Joyce revealing bridges (this is

audience?" Certainly we do. We show it by getting out of their way. ( A r t and

Brown's idea) where we thought there weren't any, turns us (my idea) not "on"

money are in this world together, and they need each other to keep on going.

but into artists. Orthodox seating arrangement in synagogues. Indians have known

Perhaps they're both on their way out. Money'll become a credit card without a

it for ages: life's a dance, a play, illusion. Lila. Maya. Twentieth-century art's opened our eyes. Now music's opened our ears. Theatre? Just notice what's around. (If what you want in India is an audience, Gita Sarabhai told me, all you need is one or two people.) II. He said: Listening to your music I find it provokes me. What should I do to enjoy it? Answer: There're many ways to help you. I'd give you a lift, for instance, if you were going in my direction, but the last thing I'd do would be to tell you how to use your own aesthetic faculties. ( Y o u see? We're unemployed. If not yet, "soon again 'twill be." We have nothing to do. So what shall we do? Sit in an audience? Write criticism? Be creative?) We used to have the

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artist up on a pedestal. Now he's no more extraordinary than we are. III. Notice audiences at high altitudes and audiences in northern countries tend to be attentive during performances while audiences at sea level or in warm countries voice their feelings whenever they have them. A r e we, so to speak, going south in the way we

50

monthly bill. What'll art become? A family reunion? If so, let's have it with people in the round, each individual free to lend his attention wherever he will. Meeting house.) V I . After an Oriental decade, a Tibetan B i k k u returned to Toronto to teach. He told me that were he to speak the truth his audience would drop to six. Instead he gives lectures transmitting not the spirit but the understandable letter. Two hundred people listen on each occasion, all of them deeply moved. (Art's a way we have for throwing out ideas—ones we've picked up in or out of our heads. What's marvelous is that as we throw them out—these ideas— they generate others, ones that weren't even in our heads to begin with.) Charles Ives had this idea: the audience is any one of us, just a human being. He sits in a rocking chair on a verandah. Looking out toward the mountains, he sees the setting sun and hears his own symphony: it's nothing but the sounds happening in the air around him.

51

Once one gets interested in world improvement, there is no stopping. I began the following text immediately after finishing the first one. I gave it a length approximately the same but slightly different. The notebooks in which I wrote it were with me wherever I went. I finished it early in September 1966 in Pontpoint (par Pont-SainteMaxence) north of Paris in the country home of John de Menil and in the room where Montesquieu, I was told, had also written and on a not too dissimilar subject. It was accepted by Maxine Groffsky for publication in the Spring 1967 issue of the Paris Review.

part of anyone): no sheep. credit.

World

Hearing my thoughts, he asked: Are you a Marxist?

Answer: I'm an

anarchist, same as you are when you're telephoning, turning on/off the lights, drinking water.

Private prospect of

enlightenment's no longer sufficient. just self- but social-realization.

Not Tuller

spoke of Semantography, universal picture language devised by C. X. Bliss, said it was rich in nouns while what we need's verbs. what?

D I A R Y : HOW T O IMPROVE T H E WORLD (YOU WILL O N L Y M A K E M A T T E R S WORSE) C O N T I N U E D 1966

Servant problem.

(Russia, U . S . A . )

mentioned drugs.

What's

W h i c h is which?

mind's interesting enough in the non-toxic state.

XXXII.

A s k e d about

housing utility. Fuller pointed out electrically-lit roadside telephone booths, twenty-four hour use of

XXX.

The most, the best, we can do, we

believe (wanting to give evidence of love), is to get out of the way, leave But there is no space!

facilities.

( H o w this came about escaped

our notice, no voting or purchase involved.

space around whomever or whatever it is.

Bed, food, bath to be expected,

added to telephone or a v a i l a b l e elsewhere:

Difference between

decentralization of l i v i n g . )

pennilessness now and pennilessness then: now we've got unquestioned credit. the Beginning was the Word."

our bootstraps!

"In

Pupul Jayakar

(straight from India), talking about communication without language! still speak: a) for practical reasons; b) for the pleasure of it; c) to say what should/shouldn't be done.) Bird up and overhead. Gone.

Some died.

different ways. put out. Chess.

computers, said: An explosion of the Word; (We'll

XXXI.

Mexico, India,

52

Lost in two

There was also a fire to

Alone (no one to disagree with).

studied meteorology, passed examinations, graduated, that weather's simple to predict.

(What had his teachers had in mind?)

"There's no reason for the

mistakes that are generally made." XXXIII.

Changes in aquariums: all the fish in the same tank; no Latin

Electronic

democracy (instantaneous voting on the

Up by

Asked what he did, he said he'd

Friends we no longer see.

Canada (changing citizenship).

I

Kremen said the human

information.

Cross-Texas, eighty miles per

53

hour, radio rocks and rolls (now I listen): "If it's a game, I won't play it.

Don't just stand there.

Tell me

what's, what's, what's, what's on your mind."

the heart of the matter, establish a global voltage, a single design for plugs and jacks.

connecting means but the things to be Drafted

anyway, he was put on a train going south.

connected.

XXXV.

sculpture (fact of object): laser

Then, since he never cashed any

projection of three-dimensional images.

of the checks they'd given him, he

To remove object place your hand in thin

received an honorable discharge.

air behind it.

(Russian chickens had diseased muscles. Chemical therapies failed.

The

muscular tissues'd been reduced to Boddhisattva Doctrine: Enter non-sentient, are ready to do likewise. Couldn't believe my eyes (stopping for lunch in R e d Bud, Illinois): a single photograph of nature (mountains, lake, island, forests) enlarged, printed twice, once left to right, once right to

Proposal: take facts of

art seriously: try them in economics/ politics, giving up, that is, notions about

I remember clams from the

aquarium (near the Farmer's Market, admission ten cents) : their movement, their timing of it.

They were a bed,

immobile, one on top of the other, two feet deep in a tank of water, sand

Isn't.

We were told

XXXVI.

Weather feels good.

More rain is needed.

Water.

He p l a y e d two games, winning one, losing the other.

He was continually himself,

totally involved i n each game, unmoved

balance (of power, of wealth),

by the outcome of either.

They will kill

you, she said, with kindness.

There's a

temptation to do nothing simply because For

instance, since electronics is at

What's the

nature of his teaching?

For one

thing: devotion (practice gives evidence of i t ) .

there's so much to do that one doesn't

54

Gardens

Sound exhibited years ago in a Seattle

to wait.

single image, seam down the middle.

Begin anywhere.

Soissy-sur-Ecole.

on the bottom of the tank.

left, the two prints juxtaposed to form a

know where to begin.

Hunting for

that seem uncultivated: Tinguely's at

Nirvana only when all beings, sentient,

foreground, background.

What's interesting about one m i n d is that it works i n different w a y s .

one thing, finding another.

chaos, disorganized by electrical means.)

Eugenics.

What's interesting about

minds is they work differently. Suddenly,

the chickens were healthy.

XXXIV.

Way's being found to

overcome problem inherent in painting and

He escaped, was caught, spent a year in service.

Vary not the

transformers and adaptors.

He registered as a conscientious objector.

Remove the need for

For another: not just

p l a y i n g half the game but p l a y i n g a l l of it ( h a v i n g a view that includes that of the opponent).

Suddenly a clam rose to

55

struck by lightning. the surface directly, remained there a moment, then descended slowly,

picture that's not hanging straight.

leaf-like, tipping one way, then the

Flowers are withering.

other, arriving at the bottom to produce

vacation.

a disturbance, such that clam after clam many, sometimes not one at all,

me first." transformed.

Projects involving many

Private concerns stumble along.

one seems to know.

liberation. Kama?

How old should

exist, why doesn't it? why aren't we all in it?

Skinner: "Let us agree to

become.

illness, wisdom better than ignorance,

usury.

love better than hate, and productive We

than it (Civil War) is. India.

eight on Automation, Economics and

below white with the suds of detergents,

society should be geared for employment

jammed with beer cans, suggested

or unemployment voted six to two in favor

roof.

containers that one could eat.

"I breathe." There's no stopping.

Hedges form the rectangular rooms. Apple tree, admired, split as though

56

Indian standing by New Jersey

waterfall seeing the surface of the pool

Employment considering whether VS.

The sky's its

Rest of the

world's suffered surgery so it won't be

should go on working (Committee of

Starvation.

Lincoln: Unless next President

hundred years'll be in worse situation

7Jow that we have them we think we

garden's a bungalow.

Pound's refrain: down with

outlaws private banking, America in

invented machines in order to reduce our

XXXVIII.

If it does,

What traitor

thinks makes clear what nation's mind's

start with, that health is better than

of employment).

If a Utopia such as Skinner '48 described (Waiden Two), doesn't

arouses religious emotion (conduces to

work.

Spirit's materialized.

Walking along, it'll happen we touch

XXXIX.

Tolstoy: art properly

energy better than neurotic sloth.

Moksha

one another, falling immediately in love.

No

brotherhood, all mankind, no boundaries).

"World's O.K. as

transformed is artha from which it was a

They go on

they be before they smoke marijuana?

Result:

Individual's thoughts become

is": "Work to make the world O.K."

The

fact their parents have separated doesn't looking at television.

We're open-minded.

social projects.

people and many interruptions go well.

disturb the children.

Sky's

"He hit

idea leaving head that had it returns

(Doing all that we needed to XXXVII.

M u d is on the windshield,

ready for launching of missiles.

producing a dance that completely do.)

Gardener's on

fallen branches wherever we go.

did likewise, sometimes several, sometimes

involved us.

Coincidence?

Branch of it's on the lawn like a

The

flavors. nature.

Different

Things that return to XL.

TofinanceUnion vs.

Confederacy, Lincoln authorized private banking in the U.S.A.

57

Credit

(conventionally 9/lOths ot economic power, actual money constituting the remaining tenth) became the property of bankers.

The notion is that not

the part of others. going.

Even now, he told me, they sit at

Nine times as much as a banker

had was safely to be loaned for interest.

the crossroads in African villages regenerating society.

As the story goes•.Dad ran away, came to a ranch, was given a job irrigating (a Tie looked the land

over, made something, dug something (can't remember which). necessary. do, theyfiredhim.

XLI.

We're getting

rid of the habit we had of explaining everything.

Margaret M e a d ' s idea re

metropolitan transportation ( D u c h a m p had same idea i n 'twenties): private cars parked at city limits; city cars used as one uses carts i n super-markets and airports, abandoned at one's destination. Police busy returning cars to parking lots, getting them serviced or repaired whenever necessary.

Basic Economic

Security (Robert Theobald: Free Men and Free Markets): everyone'Il have what he needs.

anarchist.

Wanting things that are

Martin's M e n Against the State.) adopted.

sooner even than I expected.

The mushrooms appeared XL1I.

To

deciding finally to draw this line: N o jumping up and down on the beds.

it's destroyed by shadows, spoiled by

58

XLIII.

A s he travels from one place to another, he leaves things behind.

He needs help but

no one knows where he is.

Don't know

what to read, Love's Body or out-of-date newspapers that are lying around. Everything we come across is to the point.

Living underground because

there was no money.

Arizona land and air

permitted making mounds, covering them with cement, excavating to produce rooms, providing these with skylights.

For

anyone approaching, the community was invisible.

Cacti, desert plants: the

land seemed undisturbed.

Quantity

(abundance) changes what's vice, what's virtue.

Selfishness is out;

carelessness is in.

know whether or not art is contemporary, we no longer use aesthetic criteria (if

After they went out to

play, he told me what trouble he'd had in

in return for having done something

machines don't do.

He

introduced me to two Negro children he'd

scarce, he'll make them, find them, get them (as long as the supply lasts)

I visited an aging (He had the remaining copies of

9Vo further work was

Seeing he had nothing to

Mental hospitals:

localization of a resource we've yet to exploit.

job that'd kept several men busy every day all day long).

We'll take the mad

ones with us, and we know where we're

everyone'Il want his deposit back at the same time.

ambient sounds); (assuming these) we use social criteria: can include action on

characteristic.) litterbug."

(Waste's "Don't be a

"Keep North Carolina green." Scratch the Ten Commandments.

59

One of

the new ones: Thou Shalt Not Live

of a family, later as part of a community,

(in addition to birth control, control of birth, euthanasia). did we now must do.

then as living i n a city, citizen of such

What nature

XLIV.

Bad politics

( Souvtchinsky ) produce good art. what use is good art?

But of

(Johns said he

could imagine a world without it and that there was no reason to think it would not be a better one.) cooking.

He had been

Started a small restaurant,

trained as a singer.

Gave up music f o r

busy three times a day instead of theatrically once (even then not everyday).

noticed Negro hitchhikers, tribesmen who cover their bodies w i t h a fly-attracting grease, flies being considered the finest ornament, he asked the chauffeur to pick the people up, the chauffeur refused. Chauffeur said the grease left i n the car w o u l d be nearly impossible to remove: " Y o u ' d never get r i d of the flies." A meal without mushrooms is like a day without rain.

Raised as a

Methodist, I've never taken drugs. When a physicist told me electrodes near my ears would remove my sense of balance or, were I flying through space and the capsule was revolving, make me think my balance was normal, I was fascinated.

no l i m i t to that of w h i c h he is a part. XLVI. Keep it.

Asking Duchamp why I accept

electronics, refusing chemistry, he said, "It's not against the law."

George Herbert M e a d ' s

discussion of the religious attitude: first one t h i n k s of himself as one

60

The past?

Fuller's answer:

Times Square, for instance: cover

it with a dome; put in tables, chairs, plastic carpeting.

(Keep what remains

so it's there to be enjoyed, not just read about.)

Chinese proceed differently, Häger reports.

Revolting against

themselves, they send tradition-maintaining artists, actors, musicians off to

J u l i a n B e i n a r t said that when, being chauflered i n S o u t h Africa, he

XLV.

and such a country; finally, he feels

hard labor in distant places.

Clean slate.

After each war, industry offers new products for sale.

T h e benefits from

the present conflicts (hot and cold, o n earth, i n space) w i l l be enormous.

No

organization, school, for instance, w i l l be able to afford them.

T h e only customer

(not just rich but big enough to use them) w i l l be the globe itself.

XLVII.

All the garbage cans in West Germany are the same size.

They have lids designed so

that the only thing one has to do is place them at the back of the garbage truck.

The truck does the rest: picks

them up, turns them upside-down, opens the lid, receives the garbage, closes the lid, sets them back on the street right-side-up.

After getting

the information from a small French manual, I was glad to discover that Lactarius piperatus and L. vellereus, large white mushrooms growing plentifully wherever I hunt, are indeed

61

excellent when grilled.

now provided between New York, Chicago, and

Raw, these have a

milk that burns the tongue and throat. Indigestion.

Washington.

Cooked, they're delicious.

XLVIII.

discipline himself?

H o w will one

government and/or war.

M o r e than he needs

of everything'll do it for h i m .

lie

Palma will be interesting again, then Dardona and off to M i l a n and after which the western coast of Yugoslavia & tour

Open and closed

(at southern end) of Grecian Islands

communities (a botanical expression): disturbing the earth, men have opened

after which plane from Athens to New York. Many travelers,—going everywhere.

Seeds and spores in the air

have a chance to land, to live.

Love, M o m "

Laws

along the highways except for emergencies

he'd do all the dishwashing. nothing to do.

XLIX.

elements accomplished in 1932.

to the return of the W.P.A.

LI.

concerned whether he'd be able to file his passport application without her

Examine the papers, the

help.

books, to see what ideas were had that Wot

only ideas but inventions that worked .Dad's dehydrator that worked electrostatically, separating refuse oil into dry chemicals, water that could be drunk, oil of the highest grade, his means for preventing lightning. Picturephone: limited commercial service

"Utopia for practical purposes."

his mother, wanting to go shopping,

certificate of wealth was abandoned in

62

It's the

Tall Jewish teenager just ahead of me,

Same year

(John McHale comments) gold as a

could be, but weren't, put to use.

Returning from

only thing we ever had any talent for."

Technical

acquisition by science of ninety-two atomic

the U.S.A.]

Sometimes he had

Europe: "We're all looking forward

Shelter's inside.

[Buckminster Fuller's Profile of the Industrial Revolution.

Shortly the

others were helping.

or at designated points; law prohibiting the picking of useful plants.

More irritated by the

schedule than the work, he announced

we need to break: law forbidding stops

Home begins outside.

Marcel Duchamp.

" . . . Valencia, cathedral—University.

was that they didn't bother with the

it up.

Abundance.

paid the air-travel tax, didn't ask to see

the people who were using marijuana and LSD conventions of greeting one another or

L.

Officials checked to make certain we'd our passports.

told me one of the things he noticed among

saying good-by.

Limitation: customers must

be highly involved in business,

After several departures, always

coming back, she finally left the crowded room.

Discovering that he'd play chess, I brought out my portable magnetic set.

Standing in line, we played two games, leaving the second one unfinished. T h e cows i n India, not understanding traffic lights, cross intersections whenever they reach them.

63

Motorists

never get angry.

T h e y wait patiently.

The

evening air's heavy w i t h the odor of

asked Fuller whether he played chess.

said he used to, but that now he plays only one (the biggest ) game.

burning cow-dung, fuel used for cooking.

strong constitution"), encouraging

Fewer cows:

youth who've inherited from television,

more food for the starving millions. Lll.

their "third parent," world

Story Agam told: "I'm looking for a key I lost over there."

consciousness.

"Why not look, "It's too

then, where you lost it?" dark over there.

T e l e v i s i o n up-to-date,

things televised aren't.

More we leave the land, the more

CIV.

productive it becomes.

Receiving

set, appliances up-to-date, home isn't.

Architecture: "Environment control

("more

Society 15:1, Unesco publication). Continuity values giving way to flexibility

with less" ) " i n s t i t u t i n g . . . w o r l d

values.

industry . . . "

where we do it.

" I n c l u d e . . . design o f . . .

Automation alters what's done and

services, maintenance, parts inventories

mind.

performances

(John McHale.)

k i n d of l i v i n g . "

" A l l o w i n g any

truth.

services.

in it (Takahashi's preference).

LIII.

coats, white car, using flashlights, asking, "Where's the m a d w o m a n ? " ) w a s taken a w a y The children sleep Removing

(Perpetual motion.)

social controls to points where they

escape our notice. Make decisions.

64

August '66, is.

Instead I read what

clues here and there. World Food.

World Health

Listened to Fuller on the

'phone, heard him insist: "World—not LV.

In

connection with space travel, the Russians, they say, have f o u n d a means

Examine situations. Implement them.

I have no

I find in bookstores, libraries, getting

international—Man."

at home, p l a y i n g a n d h a v i n g their meals

No one I speak to

list, don't know what the number,

The mother

( t w o days ago—they came i n white

next door.

September '65 : sixty-one

knows anything about them.

Music having too many or not enough notes

in a straight-jacket.

She would begin to speak the

April '64: fifty-five global global services.

Weights, measures.

The father's a dope addict.

Y o u could always tell

when she was about to go out of her

r e q u i r e d to m a k e . . . service operable a r o u n d the w o r l d . "

Article by Avner Hovne on

automation (Impact of Science on

"each progressive m o d e l obsolete . . .

and transportation

Technique for

changing society: education followed by unemployment.

f a c i l i t y " , " d w e l l i n g advantage" ( F u l l e r ) , materials scrapped, reprocessed",

"They think 'world'. . .

Theirs will be the most powerful and constructive revolution in all history."]

I look for it here where

there's light."

He does

this energetically, globally ("I have a

Buffalo enterprise: manufacture of contraceptives for cows.

He

to induce sleep electronically. [I

I n twenty

or thirty minutes one can get as m u c h

65

rest as eight or nine hours normally provide.

kitchen doors).

Economics (money). Bernard

!Monnier said: yes.

"It's a question of

converse.

credit, entirely fictional, conventional."

Asked whether it's

After coffee w e p l a y solitaire,

paintings a n d sculpture ("Everything's been looked a t " ) .

masks but the feelings people give one another), he again said: yes.

the forest."

Artists never had enough

time to do their work.

in TAallorca.

Leisure, present or

Perhaps the fact we haven't gotten to know one another makes us think that

H e got the He

else would profit from them.

He made

contracts no one cared to sign. different from the view that all's unequal (unique).

Take

SVo likes or dislikes

implicit in either view.

Move, but only after

Non-obstruction.

you're fully aware of all the

Criticism becomes

design (one's faculties used before

X-quantities.

Indian

philosophy and society at loggerheads: Indian society limited to family; family's defined as stopping at the seventh relationship.

Another

error, Japanese: the refusal to be formally introduced (brings about philanthropies one doesn't want to The property at Pontpoint. Formality a n d informality m i x e d :

rather than after something's done). Dialogue.

CVIII.

(Music's made it

perfectly clear .• we have all the time in the world.

What we used timidly to take

eight minutes to play we now extend to an hour.

People thinking we're

not occupied converse with us while we're performing.)

Suzuki's lecture on Yu,

the principle of not-knowing, a not-knowing never to become a knowing.

elegance without pretense ( a n unessential

Toward the end he laughed gently,

difference between the front a n d

without expressing any accomplishment, and

66

The

view that all's equal (equal rights) is not

one's moved, to proceed in a way having

practice).

Bureaucracy.

refused to disclose them, fearing someone

Obligation to retreat, to move a piece

possibilities.

There are patches

notion his ideas belonged to him.

Urgency.

Expression of "losing tempo" in chess.

time, he says.

"We

(Sky's heavily clouded: grey,

even black, some white. of blue.)

future, is not a social problem.

LVI.

When she was asked where

flew."

always ended before the completion of

nothing to do with one's plan.

Discussing her

that was, she said she had no idea.

Their lives

people have nothing to do.

"Another part of LVII.

travels, a lady mentioned she'd been

Mobility,

confidence in another."

Four P. M . we go

hunting for mushrooms.

"It's a

question of one person having

their projects.

A t table we

chess, now a n d then glancing at the

finally a matter of personalities (not

immobility.

O n e mistake: only the

servants have T V .

67

said, "Isn't it funny?

I come all the

ultra-high voltages (global electrical networks).

way from Japan to explain something to you

differences are refreshing, nothing to do

which of its nature is not to be explained?"

Composer, who no longer

with possessions/power.

facilitates an enterprise.

Using a

services, raises money to pay for in Europe.

Mother wrote to say: "Stay

Soak up as much beauty as you

possibly can."

Mexico).

Narayana Menon had said,

"You'll like the Ambassador; he's a poet."

telephone, he locates materials, LIX.

Octavio and

Marie-Jose (we'll meet again in

arranges sounds in a piece, simply

them.

Change society so

I asked Paz whether being a diplomat took too much time from his poetry. it didn't.

"There is no trade between the two countries.

Cards punched for

insertion in telephones so we don't

He said

They are on the very

best of relations."

have to remember numbers or spend time dialing.

Acceleration.

What shall we

do with our emotions?

('Suffer them," 1

hear her saying.)

Having everything we

need, we'll nevertheless spend restless nights awake with desire for pleasures we imagine that never take place.

Things

At Darmstadt when I wasn't involved with music, I was in the woods looking for mushrooms. One day while I was gathering some Hypholomas that were growing around a stump not far from the concert hall, a lady secretary from the Ferienkurse für Neue Musik came by and said, "After all, Nature is better than Art."

She disturbed everyone around her. When the performance ended, Mother turned to her and said, "I am the composer's mother." The lady said, "Good Heavens! Your son's music is magnificent! Would you tell him, please, how much I loved it?"

also happen gradually (one of New Franz Kline was about to have the first showing of his black and white paintings at the Egan Gallery. Realizing that his mother had never seen his paintings and that she would surely be interested in doing so, he arranged for her to come to New York for the opening. After she had been in the gallery for some time, she said, "Franz, I might have known you'd find the easy way."

Babylon's anarchists was elected a member of Amsterdam's City Council). W e ' v e the right. Fuller explains, to object

After an hour or so in the woods looking for mushrooms, Dad said, "Well, we can always go and buy some real ones."

to slavery, segregation, etc. (the problem of work is s o l v e d : machines take the place of muscles); we've not yet the right to object to w a r : first we must design, then implement means for making the world's resources the possession of a l l men.

LX.

American

Sometime after my father's death, I was talking with Mother. I suggested she take a trip West to visit the relatives. I said, "You'll have a good time." She was quick to reply. "Now, John, you know perfectly well that I've never enjoyed having a good time."

In 1960 I received a letter from a university president giving me an appointment for the following academic year. I called Mother to tell her the good news. I said, "I'm to be a Fellow in the Center for Advanced Studies at Wesleyan University." Mother said, "Why are they always connecting you with the dance?" Then, after a pause, she added, "Do they know you're a Zen Buddhist?"

anarchist, 1900, admitting failure, retired to the South of France. airplane engine, 1918,flewto pieces before it left the ground.

Alloys

needed to contain the power were still undiscovered.

Discover dialectrics for

68

Dad's

When the New York Philharmonic played my Atlas Eclipticalis with Winter Music (Electronic Version), the audience more or less threw propriety to the winds. Many walked out. Others stayed to boo. On Sunday afternoon the lady sitting next to my mother was particularly violent.

69

Had Marcel Duchamp not lived, it would have been necessary for someone exactly like him to live, to bring about, that is, the world as we begin to know and experience it. Having this view, I felt obliged to keep a worshipful distance, though I had met him in the early 'forties, and in the late 'forties had written music for his sequence in Hans Richter's film Dreams that Money Can Buy. When I was in Japan in 1962 Yoshiaki Tono asked me to write a text for the September 1963 issue of Mizue, a monthly review of the fine arts, which was to include the second part of an introduction to the method of Marcel Duchamp. I gave him the following notes. Then, fortunately, during the winter holidays of '65-66, the Duchamps and I were often invited to the same parties. A t one of these I marched up to Teeny Duchamp and asked her whether she thought Marcel would consider teaching me chess. She said she thought he would. Circumstances permitting, we have been together once or twice a week ever since, except for two weeks in Cadaques when we were every day together. Remarks here and there in my second and third texts on world improvement were suggested by things he did or ideas he expressed on these occasions.

There are two versions of the ox-herding pictures. One concludes with the image of nothingness, the other with the image of a fat man, smiling, returning to the village bearing gifts.

"Tools that are no good require more skill.

Nowadays we have only the second version. They call it neo-Dada. When I talked with A duchamp

M . D . two years ago he said he had been fifty years ahead of his time. Duchamp showed the usefulness of addition (moustache). Rauschenberg showed the func-

Seems Pollock tried to do it—paint on glass.

tion of subtraction (De Kooning). Well, we

It was in a movie. There was an admission of

look forward to multiplication and division. It

failure. That wasn't the way to proceed. It's

is safe to assume that someone will learn

not a question of doing again what Duchamp

trigonometry. Johns

already did. We must nowadays nevertheless at least be able to look through to what's beyond — as though we were in it looking out.

26 S T A T E M E N T S R E D U C H A M P

What's more boring than Marcel Duchamp? I ask you. (I've books about his work but never

Lisa. The musical notes taken out of a hat. The

History

glass. The toy shot-gun painting. The things he found. Therefore, everything seen—every obThe danger remains that he'll get out of the

ject, that is, plus the process of looking at it—

valise we put him in. So long as he remains

is a Duchamp.

locked up —

Ichiyanagi Wolff

bother to read them.) Busy as bees with noth-

We have no further use for the functional, the

ing to do.

beautiful, or for whether or not something is

He requires that we know that being an artist

true. We have only time for conversation. The

isn't child's play: equivalent in difficulty —

L o r d help us to say something in reply that

surely — to playing chess. Furthermore a work

doesn't simply echo what our ears took in. Of

of our art is not ours alone but belongs also to

course we can go off as we do in our corners

the opponent who's there to the end.

and talk to ourselves.

Anarchy?

The rest öf them were artists. Duchamp collects dust. Duchamp Mallarme?

There he is, rocking away in that chair, smok-

He simply found that object, gave it his name.

ing his pipe, waiting for me to stop weeping. I

What then did he do? H e found that object,

still can't hear what he said then. Years later

gave it his name. Identification. What then

I saw him on MacDougall Street in the Village.

shall we do? Shall we call it by his name or by

He made a gesture I took to mean O . K .

its name? It's not a question of names.

The check. The string he dropped. The Mona

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71

The air

We hesitate to ask the question because we do

Now that there's nothing to do, he does what-

not want to hear the answer. Going about in

ever anyone requires him to do: a magazine

silence.

cover, an exhibition, a movie sequence, etc. ad infinitum. What did she tell me about him? That he gave himself except for two days a

One way to write music: study Duchamp.

week (always the same days, Thursdays, Sundays)? That he's emotional? That he formed three important art collections? The phonograph Say it's not a Duchamp. Turn it over and it is. Theatre

would include certain and several symbols, and though he had searched his own library and several public ones, he was still looking for the right picture. I said, "Why don't you use the one in Jean Erdman's knitting book?" Joseph Campbell laughed because he knew I hadn't even seen the picture. Mrs. Coomaraswamy said, "Let me look at it." Jean Erdman stopped knitting and gave her the book. Mrs. Coomaraswamy began interpreting the picture, which was of a girl in a sweater standing in a landscape. Everything, it turned out, referred precisely to the subjects with which Joseph Campbell was concerned, including the number in the upper right-hand corner.

Alan Watts gave a party that started in the afternoon, New Year's Eve, and lasted through the night and the following day. Except for about four hours which we spent napping we were never without food or drink. Alan Watts lived near Millbrook. His cooking was not only excellent but elaborate. There was, for instance, I forget just when, a meat pie in the shape of a large loaf of bread. Truffles ran through the meat, which had been wrapped first in crepes and then in the crust, in which had been inscribed in Sanskrit " O M . " Joseph Campbell, Jean Erdman, Mrs. Coomaraswamy, and I were the guests. Jean Erdman spent most of the time knitting. Alan Watts, Mrs. Coomaraswamy, and Joseph Campbell conversed brilliantly about the Orient, its mythologies, its arts, and its philosophies. Joseph Campbell was concerned at that time about the illustration of his Zimmer book, Philosophies of India. He was anxious to find a picture which

I was arguing with Mother. I turned to Dad. He spoke. "Son John, your mother is always right, even when she's wrong."

72

This article was first published in the Jewish Museum catalog of the work of Jasper Johns early in 1964. I began work on it in September 1963. I searched for a way of writing which would relate somehow to the canvases and personality of the painter. The absence of unpainted space in most of his work and, what seemed to me, an enigmatic aura of his personality produced a problem, one which I was determined to solve and which for five months occupied and fascinated me. As a matter of fact, it still does. Johns more than any other painter has provoked large numbers of people to the use of faculties they would not otherwise have employed. I needed help. I got this from Lois Long and Merce Cunningham, close friends of mine and of Jasper Johns. They gave this help first in conversation, second in patient reading and discussion of my writing as it proceeded. After giving up plans for a text which involved elaborate use of chance operations with respect to type faces, size of type, superimpositions of type, collage of texts previously written about Johns by other critics, I settled on the plan of making use—as described in the note in this volume preceding Rhythm Etc.—of my Cartridge Music. However, I took the empty spaces which developed from that way of writing as spaces to be filled in with further writing. The paragraphs and paragraph signs resulted from chance operations. Johns and Rauschenberg, Cunningham and Tudor have been and continue to be artists of deep significance for me. They have all brought about changes in my work. I do not know whether I will ever fulfill a project I've had now for several years: to make a correspondence between these four and the seasons: David Tudor would be spring; Johns, summer; Cunningham, fall; Robert Rauschenberg, winter (creation, preservation, destruction, quiescence). Such a project would involve me in extending the following text on Jasper Johns, so that it would be four times as long as it is, a length relative in my mind to summer and its quality of keeping things around.

JASPER JOHNS: STORIES A N D IDEAS Passages in italics are quotations from Jasper Johns found in his notebooks and published statements.

On the porch at Edisto. Henry's records filling the air with Rock 'n' Roll. I said I couldn't understand what the singer was saying. Johns (laughing): That's because you don't listen.

73

Beginning with a flag that has no space around it, that has the same size as the

doing here?" When Johns explained that they were not beer cans but had taken

painting, we see that it is not a painting of a flag. The roles are reversed: beginning

him much time and effort to make, that if she examined them closely she would

with the flag, a painting was made. Beginning, that is, with structure, the division

notice among other things fingerprints, that moreover she might also observe that

of the whole into parts corresponding to the parts of a flag, a painting was made

they were not the same height (i.e. had not come off an assembly line), why, he

which both obscures and clarifies the underlying structure. A precedent is in poetry,

asks, was she won over? Why does the information that someone has done some-

the sonnet: by means of language, caesurae, iambic pentameter, license and rhymes

thing affect the judgment of another? Why cannot someone who is looking at

to obscure and clarify the grand division of the fourteen lines into eight and six. The sonnet and the United States flag during that period of history when there were forty-eight states? These are houses, Shakespeare in one, Johns in the other, each spending some of his time living. 1 I thought he was doing three things (five things

something do his own work of looking? Why is language necessary when art so to speak already has it in it? " A n y fool can tell that that's a broom." The clothes (conventions) are underneath. The painting is as naked as the day it was born. H What did I say in Japan? That the Mona Lisa with mustache or just anything plus a signature equals adition, that the erased de Kooning is additive subtraction, that

he was doing escaped my notice).

we may be confident that someone understands multiplication, division, calculus, He keeps himself informed about what's going on particularly in the world of art.

trigonometry? Johns.

This is done by reading magazines, visiting galleries and studios, answering the telephone, conversing with friends. If a book is brought to his attention that he has

The cigars in Los Angeles that were Duchamp-signed and then smoked. Leaning

reason to believe is interesting, he gets it and reads it (Wittgenstein, Nabokov,

back, his chair on two legs, smiling, Johns said: M y beer cans have no beer in them.

M c L u h a n ) . If it comes to his notice that someone else had one of his ideas before

Coming forward, not smiling, with mercy and no judgment he said: I had trouble

he did, he makes a mental or actual note not to proceed with his plan. ( O n the

too; it seemed it might be a step backward. Whenever the telephone rings, asleep

other hand, the casual remark of a friend can serve to change a painting essentially.)

or awake he never hesitates to answer, f An object that tells of the loss, destruction,

There are various ways to improve one's chess game. One is to take back a move

disappearance of objects. Does not speak of itself. Tells of others. Will it include

when it becomes clear that it was a bad one. Another is to accept the consequences,

them? Deluge.

devastating as they are. Johns chooses the latter even when the former is offered. Say he has a disagreement with others; he examines the situation and comes to a

Why this palaver about structure? Particularly since he doesn't need to have any,

moral decision. He then proceeds, if to an impasse, to an impasse. When all else

involved as he is with process, knowing that the frame that will be put around the all

fails (and he has taken the precaution of being prepared in case it does), he makes

that he makes will not make the environment invisible? Simply in order to make clear that these flags-numbers-letters-targets are not subjects? (That he has nothing

a work of art devoid of complaint.

to say about them proves that they are not subjects rather than that he as a human Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it. Both are

being is absent from them. He is present as a person who has noticed that At every

impure situations, and I prefer neither.

point in nature there is something to see. A n d so: My work contains similar possibilities for the changing focus of the eye.) Structures, not subjects—if only that that

Right conduct. He moved from objecting to not objecting. Things beneath other

will make us pause long enough in our headstrong passage through history to

people to do are not that way for him. America. % Walking with him in the garden

realize that Pop A r t , if deducted from his work, represents a misunderstanding, if

of the Museum of Modern A r t , she said, "Jasper, you must be from the Southern

embarked upon as the next step after his, represents a non-sequitur. He is engaged

Aristocracy." He said, " N o , Jane, I'm just trash." She replied, "It's hard to under-

with the endlessly changing ancient task: the imitation of nature in her manner of

stand how anyone who's trash could be as nice as you are." Another lady, out-

operation. The structures he uses give the dates and places (some less confined

raged by the beer cans that were exhibited in the gallery, said, "What are they

historically and geographically than others). They are the signature of anonymity.

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75

When, dealing with operative nature he does so without structure, he sometimes

find myself, but what I found myself in was an impenetrable jungle. There are evi-

introduces signs of humanity to intimate that we, not birds for instance, are part

dently more persons in him than one. ( A ) having painted a picture gives it the title

of the dialogue. Someone, that is, must have said Yes (No), but since we are not

Flag. ( B ) having made a sculpture gives it the title Painted Bronze. ( A ) referring

now informed we answer the painting affirmatively. Finally, with nothing in it to

to ( B ) ' s work says beer when to be in character he would say ale. ( C ) is not con-

grasp, the work is weather, an atmosphere that is heavy rather than light (something

cerned with structure nor with sculpture (Jubilee). ( D ) (Painting with Two Balls)

he knows and regrets); in oscillation with it we tend toward our ultimate place: zero,

is concerned with both. ( E ) has a plan: Make something, a kind of object which as

gray disinterest.

it changes or falls apart (dies as it were) or increases in its parts (grows as it were) offers no clue as to what its state or form or nature was at any previous time.

It does not enter his mind that he lives alone in the world. There are in fact all

Physical and Metaphysical Obstinacy. Could this be a useful object? ( F ) experi-

the others. I have seen him entering a room, head aloft, striding with determination,

mentally inclined, among other ways of applying paint, stood on his head to make

an extraordinary presence inappropriate to the circumstance: an ordinary dinner

Skin.

engagement in an upstairs restaurant. There were chairs and tables, not much room,

sufficiently far away to see panoramically (Diver). (I) records history [Make Shirl

( G ) sees objects in poetic interpenetration (Fool's House).

( H ) stands

and though he seemed to be somewhere else in a space utterly free of obstructions

Hendryx's shoe in sculpmetal with a mirror in the toe—to be used for looking up

he bumped into nothing. Furthermore he reached the table where I was sitting and

girl's dresses. High School Days. (There is no way to make this before 1955.)]. (J)

recognized me immediately. Another time he was working. He had found a printed

is concerned with language, ( K ) with culture sacramentally (Tennyson). ( L ) makes

map of the United States that represented only the boundaries between them. (It

plans not to be carried out. ( M ) asks: Can a rubber face be stretched in such a way

was not topographical nor were rivers or highways shown.) Over this he had ruled

that some mirror will reorganize it into normal proportion? ( N ) is a philosopher:

a geometry which he copied enlarged on a canvas. This done, freehand he copied the

"

printed map, carefully preserving its proportions. Then with a change of tempo he

ested in working but only in playing games. ( Q ) encourages" himself and others

began painting quickly, all at once as it were, here and there with the same brush,

to do more rather than less. ( R ) destroys the works he finishes and is the cause of

" differs from a "

". ( O ) studies the family tree. ( P ) is not inter-

changing brushes and colors, and working everywhere at the same time rather than

all the others. (S) made The Critic Sees. ( T ) % Both Johns and we have other

starting at one point, finishing it and going on to another. It seemed that he was

things to do (and in a multiplicity of directions), but that he let his work have the

going over the whole canvas accomplishing nothing, and, having done that, going

American flag as its structure keeps us conscious of that flag no matter what else

over it again, and again incompletely. A n d so on and on. Every now and then using

we have in mind. H o w does the flag sit with us, we who don't give a hoot for Betsy

stencils he put in the name of a state or the abbreviation for it, but having done

Ross, who never think of tea as a cause for parties? (If anyone speaks of patriotism,

this represented in no sense an achievement, for as he continued working he often

it is nowadays global: our newspapers are internationally inclined.) The flag is

had to do again what he had already done. Something had happened which is to

nothing but The Stars and Stripes Forever. The stars are placed in the upper left

say something had not happened. A n d this necessitated the repetitions, Colorado,

hand corner of the field of stripes. But even though the whole thing is all off center

Colorado, Colorado, which were not the same being different colors in different

it gives us the impression symmetry does, that nothing is in the wrong place. The

places. I asked how many processes he was involved in. H e concentrated to reply

flag is a paradox in broad daylight: proof that asymmetry is symmetry. That this

and speaking sincerely said: It is all one process.

information was given before so to speak the work was begun is a sign, if one needed one, of generosity which, alas, passeth understanding. Looking around his

Conversing in a room that had both painting and sculpture in it and knowing as he

thoughts, he sees them in the room where he is. The clock doesn't always tell the

does that there is a difference between them, he suddenly laughed for he heard what

same time. The dining room table in the dining room does. We're not idiots. Just

he had just said (I am not a sculptor). I felt suddenly lost, and then speaking to me

as, answered, the telephone presents an unexpected though often recognized voice,

as though I were a jury he said: But I am a sculptor, am I not? This remark let me

so a table should speak, provoking, if not surprising, at least a variety of responses.

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77

Eating is only one. The dining room table will not do. It is taken apart, stored, then sent to the south. Another, a loan not a possession, but having a history of many

work was finished and never returned. The application for the registration of the car has not been found. It is somewhere among the papers which are unfiled and i n

uses, is brought in. That it is round is its concern. It might have been square or

different places. F o r odd trips a car is rented. If it gets too hot, a window is opened.

rectangular. Its surface, however, stimulates the tendency to do something, in this

The freezer is full of books. The closet in the guest room is full of furniture. There

case a process of bleaching and staining. A n d the chairs around it: the removal of

is, and anyone knows there is, a mystery, but these are not the clues. The relation-

varnish and the application of paint. The result is nothing special. It looks as

ship between the object and the event. Can they 2 be separated? Is one a detail

though something had been tried and had been found to work: to have many uses,

of the other? What is the meeting? Air?

not focussing attention but letting attention focus itself. The situation must be Yes-and-No not either-or. Avoid a polar situation. A target He does not remember being born. His earliest memories concern living with his grandparents in Allendale, South Carolina. Later, in the same town, he lived with an aunt and uncle who had twins, a brother and sister. Then he went back to live with his grandparents. After the third grade in school he went to Columbia, which seemed like a big city, to live with his mother and stepfather. A year later, school finished, he went to a community on a lake called The Corner to stay with his Aunt Gladys. He thought it was for the summer but he stayed there for six years studying with his aunt who taught all the grades in one room, a school called Climax. The following year he finished high school living in Sumter with his mother and stepfather, two half-sisters and his half-brother. He went to college for a year and a half in Columbia where he lived alone. He made two visits during that period, one to his father, one to his mother. Leaving college he came to New York, studying in an art school for a little over six months. After applying for a scholarship, he was called into an office and it was explained that he could have the scholarship but only due to his circumstances since his work didn't merit it. He replied that if his work didn't merit it he would not accept it. Later, working in a bookstore on 57th Street, he went to see an exhibition at the Stable Gallery. Leo Steinberg seeing him asked if he was Michael Goldberg. He said: I am Jasper Johns. Steinberg said: That's strange; you look so familiar. Johns said: I once sold you a book. Clothes do not make him. Instead, his influence at rare and unexpected moments extends to his clothes, transforming their appearance. N o mask fits his face. Elegance. H He went to the kitchen, later said lunch was ready. Wild rice with Boleti. Duck in a cream sauce with Chanterelles. Salad. Hazelnut cake with Coffee.

is not a paradox. Ergo: when he painted it he did not use a circular canvas. H H o w lucky to be alive the same time he is! It could have been otherwise, f Conversation takes place whether the telephone rings or not and whether or not he is alone in the room. (I'm believing painting to be language, .. .) Once he does something, it doesn't just exist: it replies, calling from him another action. / / one takes delight in that kind of changing process one moves toward new recognitions (?), names, images. The end is not in view; the method (the way one brush stroke follows another) is discursive. Pauses. Not in order through consideration to arrive at a conclusion. (Staying with him is astonishing: I know perfectly well that were I to say I was leaving he would have no objection, nor would he if I said I was not going.) A painting is not a record of what was said and what the replies were but the thick presence all at once of a naked self-obscuring body of history. A l l the time has been put in one (structured?) space. He is able, even anxious, to repair a painting once it is damaged. A change in the painting or even someone looking at it reopens the conversation. ConversatiJn goes on faithful to time, not to the remarks that earlier occurred in it. Once when I visited him he was working on a painting called Highway. After looking at it I remarked that he had put the word right in the middle. When I left he painted over it so that the word, still there, is not legible. I had forgotten that this ever happened. He hasn't. H Three academic ideas which have been of interest to me are what a teacher of mine (speaking of Cezanne and cubism) called "the rotating point of view" (Larry Rivers recently pointed to a black rectangle, two or three feet away from where he had been looking in a painting, and said ". . . like there's something happening over there too."); Marcel Duchamp's suggestion "to reach the Impossibility of sufficient visual memory to

The thermostats are fixed to the radiators but lead ineffectually to two bare wires.

transfer from one like object to another the memory imprint"; and

The Jaguar repaired and ready to run sits in a garage unused. It has been there

idea...

since October. A n electrician came to fix the thermostats but went away before his

part of the surrounding atmosphere, f A target needs something else. Anything in

Leonardo's

that the boundary of a body is neither a part of the enclosed body nor a

79

fact will do to be its opposite. Even the space in the square in which it is centrally

number of greater size but in a smaller area. (The two rectangles are not equal:

placed. This undivided seemingly left over area miraculously produces a duplex

together they produce asymmetry.) Because there are ten different numerals, and

asymmetrical structure. Faces.

because each single lithograph shows only one of them in the lower rectangle, there

Make this and get it cast. (Painting with ruler and "gray.") Sculpt a folded flag

one of thirty sets: a third in different colors on white, ten in black on off-white, the

and a stool. Make a target in bronze so that the circles can be turned to any re-

rest in gray on natural linen. ( A l l the papers have as watermark the artist's signa-

lationship. All the numbers zero through nine. 0 through 9. Strip painting before

ture. ) The working process employed two stones: a large one upon which the two

tying it with rope (Painting with a rope). Do Not Combine the 4 Disappearances.

structures appear, a smaller one having the inferior rectangle alone. A s the work

A through Z. He didn't do this because it seemed like a jewel. (The individual

proceeded, due partly to things that happened outside his control, partly to his own

are ten different lithographs in each portfolio, one for each numeral. The edition is

letters disappear into a single object.) Perhaps there's a solution. It moves. It moved. It was moved. It can, will, might move. It has been moved. It will be moved

acts, the stones passed through a graphic metamorphosis showing both utter and subtle changes. The smaller stone, given its own color or value (sometimes barely differentiated from the color or value given the larger one), appears on only a single

(can't have fust it).

lithograph of a given portfolio, on in fact that lithograph having the large number Does he live in the same terror and confusion that we do? The air must move in as well as out—no sadness, fust disaster. I remember the deadline they had: to put up a display, not in windows on a street but upstairs in a building for a company that was involved in sales and promotion. Needing some printing done they gave me the job to do it. Struggling with pens and india ink, arriving at nothing but failure, I gradually became hysterical. Johns rose to the occasion. Though he already had too much to do, he went to a store, found some mechanical device for facilitating lettering, used it successfully, did all the other necessary things connected with the work and in addition returned to me my personal dignity. Where had I put it? Where did he find it? That his work is beautiful is only one of its aspects. It is, as it were, not interior to it that it is seductive. We catch ourselves looking in another direction for fear of becoming jealous, closing our eyes for fear our walls will seem to be

corresponding to the number of that portfolio. Beyond these three sets of ten, three portfolios exist hors de commerce. They alone show the total work, but each of them is unique, printed in the different inks on the different papers. The world he inhabits us in? One in which once again we must go to a particular place in order to see what there alone there is to see. The structure above is as unchanging as the thirteen stripes of our flag. The structure below changes with each number just as the number of stars changes with each change in history. (The paradox is not just in space but in time too: space-time.) The alphabets were arranged that way in a book. He derived from them his own similar arrangement of numbers. Competition as definition of one kind of focus. Competition (?) for different kinds of focus. What prize? Price? Value? Quantity? Given the title and date of one of his works, he sometimes can remember it only vaguely, other times not at all. 51 He is a critic. No matter how inspired it may have been, he refuses another's leap to a conclusion

empty. Skulduggery.

if it reveals that what was to be done was not done. He is puzzled by a work that Focus. Include one's looking. Include one's seeing. Include one's using. It and its use and its action. As it is, was, might be (each as a single tense, all as one). A = B. A is B. A represents B (do what I do, do what I say).

fails to make clear distinctions (e.g. between painting and sculpture). Shrugging his shoulders he smiles. Grimly determined he makes The Critic Sees. % The more hurricanes the better, his house is insured. Compact, opaque, often highly colored, cryptocrystalline . . . He is Other for whom to have been born is captivity. Alone he accepts the stricture as a wild animal can. Gazed at, he is of necessity arrogant.

The demand for his work exceeds the supply. The information that he has stretched a canvas, if, that is, it was not already commissioned, produces a purchase. He conceives and executes an exclusive plan: the portfolios of lithographs. Two rows

The charcoal 0 through 9 began with an undivided space. But it was not the be-

of numbers, 0 1 2 3 4 above, 5 6 7 8 9 below, the two rows forming a rectangle

ginning. It was analysis of a painting in progress that used superimposed numbers

having ten equal parts; centered below this and separated by space is a single

as structure. It was not the work he was working on.

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History of art: a work that has no center of interest does the same thing that a

We no longer think of his works when we see around us the similar objects they

symmetrical one does. Demonstration: what previously required two artists, Johns

might be thought to represent. Evidently these bronzes are here in the guise of

does alone and at the same time. 1 1 drove to his studio downtown. H e was sitting

works of art, but as we look at them we go out of our minds, transformed with

looking at an unfinished painting (which is one of the ways he does his w o r k ) : all the

respect to being.

colors in profusion; the words red, yellow, and blue cut out of wood hinged vertically to the edges of two separately stretched canvases, the mirrored imprints of the

A l l flowers delight him. He finds it more to the point that a plant after being green

letters legible on both; one letter not in wood but i n neon; the wooden ones with

should send up a stalk and at its top burst into color than that he should prefer one

magnets permitting fixing and changing the position of objects—a beer can, a

to others of them. The highest priority is given, if he has one out of the ground,

coffee can, paint brushes, a knife, no fork or spoon, a chain, a squeegee, and the

to putting a plant in the earth. Presented with bulbs from the south, impatient for

spool from a supply of solder. The next day uptown he was working on the gray

them to bloom, he initiated a plan for a sped-up succession of seasons: putting

numbers, the sculpmetal ones (Overcome this module with visual virtuosity. Or

them to freeze on the terrace and then in the warmth of an oven. Flowers, however,

Merce's foot? (Another kind of ruler.) Foreign colors and images.). A n d the same

are not left to die in a garden. They are cut and as many varieties as are blooming

day laboriously on the shoe with the mirror in the toe. We wonder whether, if

are placed together in a fierce single arrangement, whether from the garden, the

chinaberry trees meant the same to us as they do to him (Spanish moss too, and the

roadside, or the florist's: one of these, two of those, etc. ( D o not be fooled: that

seashore and the flat land near it that makes him think the world is round, Negroes,

he is a gardener does not exclude him from hunting; he told me of having found the

the chigger-ridden forest and swamps that limit the cemeteries and playgrounds, the

blue Lactarius in the woods at Edisto.) Besides making paintings that have

churches, the schools, his own house, in fact, all up on stilts against probable

structures, he has made others that have none (Jubilee for instance). I mean that

inundation, azaleas and oleanders, palm trees and mosquitoes, the advent of an

were two people to tell what the division of that rectangle is into parts they would

outlandish bird in the oak outside the screened porch, the oak that has the swing

tell two different things. The words for the colors and the fact that a word is not

with an automobile tire for sitting, the swing that needs repair (the ropes are frayed),

appropriately colored ( " Y o u are the only painter I know who can't tell one color

the shark's teeth, the burrs in the sand on the way to the beach, the lefthanded and

from another"), these facts exercise our faculties but they do not divide the surface

righthanded shells, and grits for breakfast)—well, we just wonder.

into parts. One sees in other words a map, all the boundaries of which have been obscured (there was in fact no map); or we could say one sees the field below the

He told me that he was having a recurrence of them, that he had had them some

flag: the flag, formerly above, was taken away. Stupidly we think of abstract expres-

years before, dreams in which the things he saw and that happened were indis-

sionism. But here we are free of struggle, gesture, and personal image. Looking

tinguishable from those of the day. I must have changed the subject for he told me

closely helps, though the paint is applied so sensually that there is the danger

nothing more. When I mentioned this to her, she told me what he had said: that

of falling in love. We moderate each glance with a virtuous degree of blindness.

going one day into the subway he had noticed a man selling pencils to two women—

UWe do not know where we stand, nor will we, doubtless, ever. It is as though having

a man whose legs had been cut off, who moved about by means of a platform with

come to the conclusion that going to sleep is a thing not to do, he tells us so that

wheels. That night Johns was that man, devising a system of ropes and pulleys by

we too may stay awake, but before the words have left his lips, he leaves us in order

which to pull himself up so that he would be able to paint on the upper parts of the

that he himself may sleep. ("We imagine ourselves on a tightrope only to discover

canvas which were otherwise out of his reach. H e thought too of changing the

that we are safe on the ground. Caution is unnecessary." Nevertheless we tremble

position of the canvas, putting it flat on the floor. But a question arose: H o w

more violently than we did when we thought we were in danger.) When he returned

could he move around without leaving the traces of his wheels in the paint? The

to New Y o r k from the south, she asked him how it had been. He said: It was warm.

cans of ale, Flashlight, the coffee can with brushes: these objects and the others

There were no mosquitoes. Y o u could even sit out in the yard. (I missed the polka

were not found but were made. They were seen in some other light than that of day.

dots in the area above the iower lefthand corner. Strange; because that's what I was

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83

thinking about: the paintings 0 through 9 that are covered with polka dots.) Seeing her window over the kitchen sink, he said: That's what I want to have, a window over the kitchen sink so that I can look out to the terrace. She said: What you need is a door, so that you don't have to go to the front of the house and then all the way back on the outside again. But, he said, I don't want to go out, just look out. A n d then asked (imagining perhaps there was something he could learn from her to d o ) : D o you go out? She admitted she didn't. They laughed. She pointed out the plant on the sill with last year's peppers on it and new blossoms but showing no signs of their becoming this year's peppers. He said: Maybe they need to be pollenated. A n d shortly with kleenex he was botanist, dusting and cross-dusting the flowers. Take Skin I, II, III, IV. What a great difference there is between these and anything his works before or after could have led us to expect! A s his generosity continues unabated, we waste the breath we have left muttering of inscrutability. H a d he been selfish and singleminded it would have been a simple matter for anyone to say Thank Y o u . Even though in those Edisto woods you think you didn't get a tick or ticks, you probably did. The best thing to do is back at the house to take off your clothes, shaking them carefully over the bathtub. Then make a conscientious self-examination with a mirror if necessary. It would be silly too to stay out of the woods simply

One day I telephoned Miro. He was in a New York hotel about to leave for Europe. Our conversation was in French and I had never met him. I asked him to make a gift of a painting to the Cunningham Dance Foundation, explaining that this gift would make possible a European tour on the part of the dancers. (I knew that Mir6 had seen the 1964 performances of Cunningham and his Company at the Theatre de l'Est Parisien and that he had been enthusiastic.) Miro asked me to write him a letter. I did. He replied generously, not only promising a gift but proposing performances in Spain for which he would make a poster. In further correspondence with Jacques Dupin, the poet and author of a book on Mirö's work, a project developed for a publication to be made by the Fondation Maeght in Paris. It would include gravures by Miro, my Variations VI in all of its stages, a text by me written after our meeting (which took place early in August 1966 at Saint-Paul-de-Vence), and further gravures by Miro after he'd seen my manuscripts. I was afraid he would not like my work but fortunately this was not the case. He found it interesting and proposed using the notations (which are on transparent plastic sheets and which can be in any relationship) to make his own particular arrangement of them. Before sitting down to write, I read Mirö's book, Je travaille comme un jardinier. I also read a number of texts about him. His work, of course, as for many living nowadays, is so familiar as to be part of who one is. I decided I would attempt to avoid mentioning what others consistently do: his relation to the earth. I had recourse to I-Ching operations, determining thereby that my text would have eight statements and that these would have, in order, twenty-nine, sixty-two, forty, seven, thirty-five, twenty-three, forty-seven, and fifty-eight words. I then suggested that, since Mirö's relation to the earth was not being mentioned, my statements be superimposed on maps of places where Miro had lived and worked. This suggestion was accepted but is not followed in the present printing. I wrote the text in September 1966 while visiting the Duchamps in Cadaques.

because the ticks are in them. Think of the mushrooms (Caesar's among them!) that would have been missed. Ticks removed, fresh clothes put on, something to drink, something to eat, you revive. There's scrabble and now chess to play and the chance to look at T V . A Dead Man. Take a skull. Cover it with paint. Rub it against canvas. Skull against canvas.

MIRO IN T H E THIRD PERSON: 8 S T A T E M E N T S We have the impression that we're learning nothing, but as the years pass we recognize more and more mushrooms and we find that the names that go with them begin to stick in our heads. Furthermore, we're still alive. However,

we must be cautious. Guy Nearing sometimes says that all mushroom experts die from mushroom poisoning. Donald Malcomb finds the dangers of lion hunting largely imaginary, those of mushroom hunting perfectly real.

84

Words in italics are from Mirö's writings; quotations are remarks he made in conversation. Then they said: We will kill you. They'd already placed the rope around his neck. What next but fear? (Forgive them? People mean what they say, what they do.)

85

Space. Even when close, there is distance.

Expressing in one word what it was he had always been insisting upon, he said: Anima. A few days later when I repeated the word to him, he looked puzzled; he didn't seem to understand what I was saying. I told Duchamp about this. Duchamp became quite emphatic: M i r o doesn't speak Latin; he must have said (not pro-

Going to the North Pole? Then take M i r o with you. "It seems to me I've known you all my life." The war. Unknown paintings. A night spent in laughter: omelet that fell on the floor.

nouncing the g ) : U n image.

This is the way: looking out over the sea where his island is. "I do this with all my heart." Way to do what? Catalunya. He becomes an Arabian chessplayer. (Visiting

The signs are complete (ready to become anything other than they are). Fire. We see no changes, not yet knowing how to forget.

another, one visits him. Maps. Pun to King Four.)

86

87

" Y o u open doors." He knows, I'm sure, they're automatic, closing the moment one passes through. A gardener, he's also a hunter, even when sleeping: earth disturbed, is receptive to whatever there is in the air: they told me he wanted to know, to see what was happening.

Among the letters I don't throw away when I go through my letters with the intention of throwing away as many as possible are those sent to me by Nam June Paik. We met in Darmstadt in 1958. Most of his letters are self-sufficient. They require no replies. However, one day Paik wrote to say that the Galeria Bonino in New York City was going to present his electronic art as its Exhibition No. 16 (23rd November - 11 th December, 1965) and then went on to ask whether I'd write a text for the catalog, adding, "Your writing will be as attractive as , , , , , , , , , , , , say, , , , , , , 'Jackline Kennedy's endorsement to Mayor Lindsay' , , , , , , , ,". I found this thought somewhat unsettling but it was in character. Shortly I was on the telephone telling Paik (whose work, conversation, performances, daily-doings never cease by turn to amaze, delight, shock, and sometimes terrify me) I'd do what he wanted. I wrote the following text. It was printed by the Bonino Gallery together with photographs of Paik's Robot-K456 and his electronic alterations of television images. Also included were a biographical statement, documentation of his performances and exhibitions, and a list of his publications.

To plug in the amplifier, I turn the corner. He's looking at a Giacometti. Alone (he's) not alone. Shells that have the bass clef on them remind me of music. Ballet. What will it be? I'm the first to be surprised. The simplest things give me ideas. Anonymous blindness: four of us playing chess; three were making mistakes.

I decided to finish my work as quickly as possible in order to get to the concert without missing too much of it. I did this. As luck would have it, my seat was next to that of the lady who owned the Blue Bird Tea Room, my employer. I said, "Good evening." She looked the other way, whispered to her daughter. They both got up and left the hall.

Doris Dennison had been born Doris Suckling. That was why she changed her name. Her step-brother, Peter, on the other hand, took the name she discarded. Peter Suckling had been born Peter Perfect. I once had a job washing dishes in the Blue Bird Tea Room in Carmel, California. I worked twelve hours a day in the kitchen. I washed all the dishes and pots and pans, scrubbed the floor, washed the vegetables, crates of spinach for instance; and if the owner came along and found me resting, she sent me out to the back yard to chop up wood. She paid me a dollar a day. One day I noticed that some famous concert pianist was coming to town to give a recital, and

N A M JUNE PAIK: A DIARY Passages in italics are quotations from Nam June Paik found in his letters and printed statements.

I. What is this thing called Art? T V ? (Everything at once, no matter when/where we are?) O n videocorder Paik records Pope—validity or raison d'etre for society— making an electronic fact event. The film. Korean, we put ourselves easily in your shoes, composed, as you are, of nervousness and conscience. Guiltless, why would we have erected our antennae? (We needed to experience unequivocally what we

A mother and son visited the Seattle Art Museum. Several rooms were devoted to the work of Morris Graves. When they came to one in which all of the paintings were black, the mother, placing a hand across her son's eyes, said, "Come, dear, mother doesn't want you to see these things."

88

had practiced refusing.) A r e we glued to it? Nein. The question's whether it works. It's no game: it brings us circle from graves we're in (spots of light and sound in the air we breathe). II. Five year guaranty on your Paik T V ? Is that what you want? A n d since it's art, which art is it? Change your mind or change your receiver (your receiver is your mind). Enjoy the commercials, that is to say, while you still have them. Global village: they're not here to stay. I replied things were funny

89

even though I didn't set out to make them so. A year or so later he left the room. The audience, terrorized, didn't budge. N o one spoke. The telephone rang. "It was Paik calling to say the performance is finished." III. When I told Paik (don't say Peek, Poke or Puke) and Kosugi about the Cree Indians of central Saskatchewan, Paik asked: A r e they like us? His shoes came off my feet, but, a moment later, glancing down, I noticed they were on again. His preoccupation with sex, violence, humor, criticism (it is comic or sin to say I am the first to have thrown a egg— etc. . .): but the Robot's shit is white in shapes suggesting vitamins, deodorants and the droppings of deer; the penis is the shadow of a finger; the vagina that of a whale. I V . Danger Music No. 1 for Dick Higgins: Creep into the VAGINA living WHALE!

of a

In other words, as Higgins has remarked (Postface, pg. 61), there

is no danger. Nevertheless, we worry. A r t and T V are no longer two different things. They're equally tedious. The geometry of the one's devitalized the other (find out what kind of bad habits you have); T V ' s vibrating field's shaken our arts to pieces. N o use to pick them up. Get with it: Someday artists will work with capacitors, resistors & semi-conductors as they work today with brushes, violins and junk.

Eleven composers who had written music for the dance (of whom I was one) were invited by Selma Jeanne Cohen in 1962 to write for the sixteenth number of Dance Perspectives, the issue which was called composer/ choreographer. In order to stimulate our thoughts, Miss Cohen gave us quotations from established figures in the field. I was given these: It is essential to keep the ear sensitive, but also to remember that the dance is an independent art, subject to laws of its own which can lead the choreographer to movements not really indicated in the score at all . .. to movements set above the sound on the basis of emotional timing. —Doris Humphrey I am not a creator of time. I like to be subordinated to it. Only a musician is a creator of time. . . . The music is first. I couldn't move without the music. I couldn't move without a reason and the reason is music. M y muscles only move when time comes in. —George Balanchine The text I contributed follows. It was published in 1963 with only part of the statement by Balanchine. My title and Doris Humphrey's remarks were omitted. The spaces which appear below between some of the sections of text were also omitted. Quotations with which I was unfamiliar were introduced in the margins printed in red. They were by George Bernard Shaw and Lincoln Kirstein. I liked the one by Kirstein: "It can't hurt a composer to know something about dancing."

V . European music made a crucial mistake: the separation of composition performance and listening. Color T V likewise: red, green, blue. But both must be made real (oriental): fact of non-separation. Otherwise, when we turn it on, it won't go on. Ultimately, certainly, it will be on continuously as it invisibly, inaudibly already is. Paik is working on it (7 look back with a bitter grin . . .the desperate struggle..

.).

Bathtub. "It's always this way with Paik before performances." The seeming impossibility of getting ready to begin. Wires and more wires. Antique sets used not as junk but required to come alive not as they did formerly but, poor things, ac-

W H E R E DO WE GO F R O M HERE?

cording to a new trick. Considerate, he asks us to leave. V I . Like T V , he's here to stay (though his view is larger: TV will dominate 50 years and

will gone

). What comes next? In 1970, play moonlight sonate on the moon. Humanity. He is a criminal who converses (cf. Duchamp). Technology, optical art, music, physics, philosophy. Image of utter collapse. Think again. Circa 1959-1960: My

Does dance depend? Or is it independent? Questions that seem political. They arose in an aesthetic situation. What's to be said? People and sounds interpenetrate.

new composition is now 1 minutes. (For Prof. Fortner). The Title will be either "Rondo Allegro",

or "Allegro Moderato",

or only "Allegretto".

Which is more

beautiful? I use here: Colour Projector. Film 2—3 screens. Strip tease, boxer, hen (alive). 6 years girl, light-piano, motorcycle and of course sounds, one TV. "whole art" in the meaning of Mr. R. Wagner.

// We thought that sounds took place in time. We see they're vibratory movements of particles in air. Each one, setting out from its point in space, gets to all its arrivals from a single departure. Thoughts about time drop off like dead skin. Dance takes place with one foot in the grave. "Dance or I'll shoot"—each time the

90

91

curtain goes up. Laws seem petty: they've not sacrificed tangible concerns and returns. What are the Arts? Offerings beyond the law within the limits of practicality. 1

along i n the same boat. Circumstances — a time, a place — would bring them together. We've paid our bills and the President's been elected. N o w we get down

Practicality — read the newspapers — is changing. Years ago it was a question of

to business. Business is: to space-time our arts. That's one way of putting it. A job

1. They ask when we speak: What are you trying to say? However, being told about the weather, we get ideas about the next step to be taken. It's those old statements that are so disconcerting — the ones we've memorized. A story, if it's new, could be refreshing. But when I try to remember her, I think of no stories. True, we sat together by appointment in Carnegie Tavern, but there was a twisted quality in her mind that made everything else seem absent. Nothing like conversation took place. I only begged and she refused. The other one had a chance but didn't take it and like most of us rabbits wherever he sees room he moves in. The third who might have been one of the two — well, we tried. We started a rumor that he had resigned. The young ones. Do they have to do it all over again?

fell apart: our need faded, so that aesthetic terms have totally disappeared from our

that will keep us in a state of not knowing the answers. The time-structures we made language. Balance, harmony, counterpoint, form. (When he was told that the addition of a little purple would give an impression of distance, he burst out laughing.) We resemble the anarchists of the Ohio i n the first part of the last century: too busy working to talk, or, if we talk, simply passing the time of day. What brought about the falling apart of time-structures? The introduction, perhaps, of space into our concept of time? A t least we sense that as music remaining time becomes space its elements become legion, and analytical thinking's no help. Musicians need now some way to work that doesn't deal with parameters: otherwise, which one came first — the music or the dance. We'd tried the music first, so it

like convicts, musicians'll be obliged come good weather to stay indoors.

seemed only reasonable to start things roundabout, putting the dance first. Later,

The L o r d knows we get instruction constantly. It's just that we fail to listen and

when thinking-caps were used, it became evident that underneath both music and

forget to look. Offhand I'd say I remember, but if I started out to repeat these

dance was a common support: time. This partial truth would have been hard to

words, I'd slip for sure. Fingers don't use the same time-lengths legs do. It's the

come by for a choreographer, due partly to the multiplicity of elements in the

difference between two and ten. Is this the mistake of American ballet? That it goes

theatrical dance and due for the rest to the fact that analytical thought in the field

too fast, stumbling over its torso? (Following in the footsteps of something that

of the dance was centered formerly on the problem of notation. Music, on the other

has no feet?) Instruction is on the land and in the air, both for music and for dance.

3

hand, was, in those days, a relatively simple art: a succession of pitches in a measured space of time. Moving out toward the complexity introduced by twentiethcentury noise, music's materials became more numerous. Not just pitch and time, but timbre and amplitude too: four basic elements. One could think about music on the fingers of one hand without putting his thumb in it. A l l one had to do was 2

establish a time-structure. Neither music nor dance would be first: both would go

2. We are poorer than we ever were because now we know how to spend money. And not just the studios for dance and the laboratories for music but the halls and the theatres. Renovation won't do. We need to start from scratch. The whole question of theatre has to be answered afresh. A building for people and things (sounds and lights) that will work in this day and age will be costly. Anything else is money down the drain. (Unless, of course, you are rich by virtue of not yet having begun. In that case, any place will do and you can simply use the ones that don't cost anything. However, I stopped the car when I saw him coming from the mailbox and said I'd decided that things had to be electronic even in India. He agreed.) Yet — say we managed to get such a theatre built — what good would it do if it were fixed to one place like an ancient monument?

3. He wrote to say among other things that Art was to be abandoned. I didn't answer. But I have this to say: I don't believe it. The situation we're in is unique: 1) populationexplosion leading to many more ways of dancing and making music; 2) interpenetration of the world's peoples; 3) science and technology. These latter lead like the first to many more ways so that we become Imagination personified. Awake we seem to be dreaming. There is nothing un-American about this according to a book I recently read. It is a conversation on the grand scale even if it takes the shape of soliloquy. How is it that they chatter about communication but do not heed the meaning of what they do? Take melody and accompaniment or even a four-voice counterpoint with one voice as hauptstimme. What is the meaning? It is unbelievable that as many as do what they do mean what they do. They cannot possibly be as backward as they act. What's wrong? The Educational System? The Government? The chain stores? Madison Avenue? The H-bomb? Wall Street? The critics? The churches? The unions? The American Medical Association? Television?

Breathing and walking and managing to empty the head sufficiently to notice what there is to see and hear i n the theatre we happen to be living in. There's not much more to say, or rather no space nor time to say it in.

92

93

The

circumstances under which we met (he just telephoned)

were these: a

In 1952 I was invited to speak at the Juilliard School of Music—not by the Director but by the students. They were having a series of meetings and students from other music schools were also attending. My lecture was in four parts, in all of which I applied processes of collage and fragmentation to texts which I had written earlier. There was in addition some new material. While I was lecturing, David Tudor performed a number of pieces at the piano, compositions by Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff, and myself. To coordinate our program, we used chronometers. I began the first part at 0' 00", the second at 12' 10", the third at 24' 20", the fourth at 36' 30". David Tudor's program was made without my knowing anything about it in advance. I had written my text in four columns to facilitate a rhythmic reading and to measure the silences. I read each line across the page from left to right, not down the columns in sequence. I tried to avoid an artificial manner which might have resulted from my being too strictly faithful to the position of the words on the page. I used the rhythmic freedoms one uses in everyday speech. While the lecture was being given, Feldman was sitting on the stage. Both of us answered questions put to us afterward. When neither of us could think what to say in response to some angry "question," Henry Cowell, who was present in the audience with his wife Sydney, put in a word for us, for which we were very grateful. Afterward as we tried to get through the halls to reach the room where punch was being served, students, surrounding us, continued their arguments. Cowell was always right beside us.

Philharmonic concert that included a work by Webern. We both walked out not wishing to hear what followed, shook hands and exchanged names. Later, examined scores and brought new friends to one another. There was a misunderstanding, but music changed, not only ours but that of others. The result is that if we were to meet again under similar circumstances, the music would have to be something other than Webern; otherwise we would not bother to get up and go out. Blindly in love. That alone should be a warning as to what to take as basis. A s for the other, beware, as they say, of mistaking the finger for the moon when you're pointing at it.

We're no longer satisfied with flooding the air with sound from a public-address system. We insist upon something more luminous and transparent so that sounds will arise at any point in the space bringing about the surprises we encounter when we walk in the woods or down the city streets. Thus music is becoming a dance in its own right and has, of course, new notations. There is the possibility, in fact the fact, of its having no notation at all. (This is no reference to improvisation. A s it was, it's still a question of fulfilling obligations.) What we took for truth was just a part of it, but one could have spent a lifetime stupefied!

JUILLIARD L E C T U R E There is a first step sine qua non: Devotion. This is what dance technique signifies. Say discipline ot self-renunciation. These are lessons one takes not in order to throw them away. But to enable what they are to infuse anarchic action. Flying from the nest, no other bird's wings will do. When we all shout together they still do not hear us even though they're nearby.

94

I In

the course of a

:

lecture last winter on "Before

mountains

are

things

studying

Zen Buddhism,

Dr. Suzuki

Zen,

men are men

mountains be-come

actly

what

is

what

After

studying

Zen,

and

While studying Zen

confused and which

said

one doesn't know is

ex-

which men are men

95

and

mountains are mountains

After the lecture the question

was

asked

If a sound

" D r . Suzuki

what is

the

mountains

are

mountains

men are men

and

mountains

difference between

men are men

and

before studying

Zen

and

mountains

after studying

are

?"

if

Zen

Suzuki answered

it

is

seems to be

had your

only

feet

somewhat

as

though

you

a little off the ground."

music,

men are

and

men

sounds

are

before studying

sounds.

or nowadays

case of

sounds

a

themselves 'count'

is

music

men are men one can

A t the beginning, that

it

isn't

a

human

and

hear

sounds are sounds, a

being

or

sound

and

something

tell to look

studying

, one is told

no longer

of consequence

are

their

is

immediately

who had it

;

what

musical

it is high or low

such

musical the a

state of

sound

is

not

a

and

to the

from

by

the composer

easiest that

something to hear

but

feeling

most

that

has a lasts

a

certain

whether

he

length en-joys a set

velops

not

or of

,

One then and

studying

gradually

de-

music

get a little confused

Sounds

longer just sounds,

but are letters:

A,

G.

Sharps and flats,

Two of them, four

octaves apart

are called

by

decides

likes and dislikes While

things

loudness,

time and one can hear it.

of it

certain timbre and

B,

the same letter

C,

D,

E, or even

are F, five

no

composer

e- •motional If anyone himself

proved

way

wants to

be,

composer did

but are Beethoven and

that men

Any child

tell us

A man

is

T o realize this

a man ,

he

are

not

think

you

a

one has to one

music from living

that of a are

unimBut the

the musical

ex- pression of feeling is was

get a feeling

of

but are

who had it how emotional

has to confuse

sound

a to

the case

himself

a

to the same

are not sounds at all

sounds

: this is simply not and

in

something the sounds

men

was

ascertain

rather

composer to

matter

to get yourself

and imagine that sounds

That is to say, separates

to is

no

expression by

the

final extent that the will

is

accomplished

can be how

what counts

siren

show how intelligent was

idea

fire engine's

a

In

to show

re-

but it can

can be accomplished

confusion

,

these

boat passing by

gain

portant

the

;

look at musical

a

A n d yet

game : say,

of

that

idea

what

or

follow the leader

complicated

That is to say: at

playing

The most

a

quite simple

from the horn

or

That is,

that

re-•lationships.

by a single sound

be broken up After

musical idea

more

a

in

and an abstract

are

children

like

or

are arranged

that remain

to express an idea of these

are generally is

letter

out of the system

rows,

an integration

or

A fugue

things aren't clear

tones

uses the sounds

feeling

a

or unmusical

called composition

a canon

music

noise priveleged

modes or scales

lationships

studying

a

process begins

what

While

it is tossed

The

In the Now,

not have

too complex, it's

on the grounds:

composer "Just the same

unfortunate enough to

is

the case, a

sound.

put a stop

to

studying

has to stop

all the

thinking There

is

music that all

the

world

in the

time for living

place

takes

living

any time each

is always

changing,

is to open

one's ears

it

but now

our feet

Perhaps

this

Blythe

in his book

sponsibility

artist

,

for a

the

are will

and what

,

make to

beautiful

but also

ugly,

of shadows.

He said

They are obviously

sounds;

is an echo of nothing

.

when

listening sound

of

just

that

the

that's why

Life goes on

being

takes as a something

that is not

not

what

spoke

sounds but shadows,

in of

all

the silence pregnant

98

speaks

of

silence. life.

The the first

us into nothing etc. sound.

II

So that from

and

like an alter-

that ex-tinguishes it. with

were

the piece

spring-board springs

something

that happened

Feldman

next something; fears

not just

by Morton Feldman

one the

just

very much like a piece

the first

Not one sound

required

every

is the source

to

re-

they are shadows;

a-long;

exists

now

were

is

start

rings

questions

,

this music

no silence

important

that Feldman

to

out of that nothing a-rises

the

sub-merged

death

highest

T remember

goes on

not work

sugar was

Now

ob- ject that the sounds Next time he hears

that

no sooner

I

made by

good, but also evil sounds

the

that

and it turns out

We bake a cake

statement

that is

that comes

nating current.

a

not

Let him.

he speaks of

than the telephone

what is it that is

The nothing acceptance

ground,

is

Someone may not interesting.

sugar but salt

the

greater earnestness

not

sound to

men

"The are

a

chance

what

an illusion.

but also

hear

consider that

instant

symbolical

understandable

other day

to do

are men,

hide beauty."

The important question is true,

off

the

or

Haiku. is

let's

moment

little

that thing

and a

Someone said

For

and

instant

abstract,

Sounds are sounds

of

all

immediately and one's thinking has a

something logical,

mto

but

at

The wisest

be- fore

suddenly turn

studying music

for

there is scarcely

And

If

any it

were

from which unique having

the

other

leaf

same

as

even

each leaf would po-sition in space. a

of the same

another leaf

particular suchness

it

tree

would be a

be free

coincidence be-cause

of its

Uniqueness ,

99

is

extremely

close

own

to

being here and

music

goes

on

what

will be

now.

And

changing

in the way

done

is

I imagine

more and more

to

liberate

about them

actly

uniquely,

not

sounds from abstract ideas to let them be physically,

what

is

This means for me:

knowing

I

think

is,

in

all of its

exist,

sound

a

itself,

that as contemporary

that

sound

changing it

actual

European thinking

things

considered

more and more

ex-

more and more but

what it

details

and then letting this

actually

sonorous There When it is actually

They to other

in so that

harmony,

rhythm,

pointless.

They

but which

every direction,

Silence

inter-penetrating

and yet that Feldman

has done nothing

centers

continuity

follow

any

for

he

is

His

from those

when

he

writes

so

directly

and

the idea

of

logical nature to

by

lie

is

also

like suddenly catch

on and

there

unhesitatingly making

a

construction

work

re -minds

part

of

listen

no

time All

you

in the same way all you can do

i suddenly sneeze

100

of

me

insecurity

to

do

can

do that

day

the

you

it

no sooner

just

as

people

and so on. Very fre-

his that

had were noises

piece, children them

and some of

more

piano.

from the

trying

been at

of

playing

with great

changing

hearing

him

silences in it.

was

It

Naturally,

traffic,

sounds could all

easily

sounds

than the

the piece

since

occurred while

had it

to

doing something wrong ?"

One of

that a friend

difficulty play

the

were music

over again

it

Christian said it

wasn't

and the

sounds

been played

were

was being played of

Eckhart, " A m the

be that

hear

The windows quote Meister

i n the

So much so to

play

pleasant from

in the hall,

a-gain, but that

play the piece

to

a

open,

closed the windows

he'd

"not wondering"

who is

would

end i f Christian

the

simply

I remember one day

an-other composer

windows

of the

who had

from

sense an interruption is

when

of

and

coming

us

is

had accidentally

anything

teeth, getting sleepy

music

he'd be glad

con-

another

To conclude:

necessary with

anyone making

making

another, that is to

after

sermon

and

as it is life than he begins

music

Irritating one way or

asked

A n d I'm a

But is

not a

art

keeping

heard,

he

i n - suring quality of

classifying. cold

note values

contemporary

so

ossifying,

was

boats' horns,

for

make that

and

irritating.

it

course

paper

graph

In

joy's

can

we have no time to

thinks

a piano piece

a-

music on

Eckhart music

troubled any sound

Emily Dickinson reminded

by Meister temporary

works

notes

His

of a poem

not that

contemporary,

He

Christian Wolff

knows

be-

that contemporary music is or could be art.

say,

being

nothing Why—

dishes, brushing their

washing

and

quently no one knows

contemporary

essentially different

with

of the sounds

communication

no

was the next question,

it

of

from

them

other.

involved

keep on

much

one another

not

does

one

for the reason

are

the

many

so

finishes

by one another

He

bout

surrounds

is not

unimpeded to keep

themselves

in-

their purposelessness out from them

in

life itself

and are

is

Then why, (which pro- -tects us from living)

separation

with

counterpoint, melody,

ex-ist in space

they

are

musical methods, with-out purpose

deed expressing

suddenly sneezing are not

that happen such as suddenly listening or

ing said.

respect

that

profound.

environment

any

a-bout

has brought it

themselves

changing

in a

am

completely and

a-coustical changing

I

Unfortunately,

ones

M o r t o n Feldman

101

who

is

his

music

1

right changing it

urgently that in

no

were open — or is

Feldman on graph,

and other times high, middle, player any

play

and

low

is

free

note

in

sometimes

In a series

written

Projections, A

writes his music graph

on

in at the

the

register

on music

of

paper,

pieces he

reference

to

instant

of

questioningly

paper

by no will

called

indicates

of

pitch,

success

playing

hero

to

is now

knows finally

turns

It one

can

see through

sculpture

can by

'hear through' some

acts

in

a piece of music

modern

Richard Lippold

buildings or

the

,

passing safely

through

end of the journey

,

, the horse,

to

At

almost

the

in view

or glass

such

a

just

as one

some hesitation

acquiesces,

and

into a Prince,

the hero

would

shaggy nag.

I

Christian Wolff's

music

who, have

have

except

of them

, so that,

, to toss it

as the

be led by it.

This,

up

aimless rolling

to

the

too,

horse

goes on to

giving himself of a metal ball,

102

his

on the road say, and the hero,

acquiescence

something

else

ear where he in front we

the

hero's part be-hold, the

noticed

wire

may

his quest un-

103

the kill him

the

miserable

Marcel

— in ball

whom

hero to

and for

many when

to remain

III

metal

on on

by chance,

had

Duchamp

will find

asks the

Lo,

way

see through a of

indebted,

he is most utterly This causes

indicated he

that

They proceed thus

their own, situ-ations.

perilous

only

does,

about

but horse of

As we go along dea

may

who knows

occur in

this talk I

have

no

not.

If one does,

seen

momentarily while

window

whether one will

idea

as though

traveling

if

Arizona

is more

of that

oneness with

love

the

of

comes

when he says that he is associated with all

consequences to be

from

a

he

,

notes

other composers do

accept,

he

even though

re-sponsibility

himself seriously, and

the at that point in his fear and

so has

all

and he

concern

not

think

he

what people There

confronting

any moment

destruction may come

suddenly

is fresher,

How different

this form sense

is

memory,

themes the climax,

that

which

is

secondary themes, the recapitulation, but

bound

up

with

their struggle, which is actually,

the belief

indi-vidual, and

their development, that

one

unlike the snail

705

takes

may

then

many

but what

at happens

from

own one's ,

will

are

serious problems

an

events

for

thereby diminishes

about

such

than

those

time vogue of profundity,

wishes to be considered great, in-creases

at-

make, rather

to

e-liminates from the area of possibility

that do not suggest his love

composer feels a

Feldman means

what and

written the particular

as

of

This goes to explain

what will happen down

sense

of the sounds

can foresee a

Kansas

or which

whatever,

When

across

a

To accept

interesting, re-gardless

unafraid

full

from

Kansas

whatever comes is to be

or Regard it as something

let it.

then, of course,

,

an l -

and own home

we carry our

which enables

us

that which is

when-it is necessary

it is a proof

breath-takingly beautiful

that our delight

lies

Each

presents

moment

1 for writing

to

describe

If

are

interested

nothing is a delight need not

(since we

do

not We

fear its loss,

if

that

Anything

therefore

possess it)

of

A t any moment

Would

we thought

be

owned it,

but and

and seem to be a

is it

often form.

called

can

in

the

.

Suffice

it

to

not

do

read forthcoming

say tempi,

to

itself

shall

that the

number

of superimpositions

, that is to say,

number of things

that can go

once,

and silences,

durations,

loudnesses and accents,

sounds

A t a given instant

half

half of them

immobile,

Mobile means:

ment

tossed, it acts,

but disappears

is

of

the

tables

on

mobile

are

at

and

if that

ele-

and

IV

free

We

and

anybody

knows

clinging

are

to

tradition, I

content.

I

It is the continuity

of a piece

106

you

use

the

method

and I

re-ferring

repetition?

What

poetry

Trans I formations arranged

in

past;

how un-certain

it is called

the

Most

about the future

The

that will appear

I

used

we possess

it is

since we don't, we

so are we

it

are

method

thus

and

need not destroy it might reappear

it is gone, be the present Only

realization

you

des -cription of it

tables

method

oracles.

anything

happens

the

complicated

now.

what

the

that is,

pos-sessing

derived from

for obtaining

fairly

issue

is the

coins

is a

;

not

is a detailed

Our poetry now

by tossing

music

in

Book of Changes that

,

of dis-interestedness

demonstration

to enjoy of

today,

Continuity,

to

am

myself

calling

have of

music.

significant

still

at

the

complicated,

and

furthermore,

nor

poetry If there were a part

insignificant as

the

point

torn-up,

where

most

competitive

I of life dark enough

good

nor

need it to keep out of it

107

are

remnants

a tradition nor

musicians that

bad a

but light

is

of neither simply from

art

I

would

want

alive

fumbling around,

if necessary,

I rather think

one can dispense

with all that

because nothing is

to be in that darkness,

and

derol; —

no one

loses

.

I think

I

And

question

to

cautiously

nothing

but I

agree,

pro-ceed

do

What is that? having

our

you

in everything.

to

H.

?

own thoughts,

his

C.

changing

since

it is free

we don't,

As

is far

A

as

pupil

E

In series

works

of graphed

with

regard

to

pitch

ex- tended just

is

That is, may

cross

precisely way

a

because which

the

you

have

of the words which

keep

talk

when

words

need

to

living,

A r t should come from

overhead

calendar

hours for breakfast ,

I also met

Meister Eckhart:

and the

stick to

her

us

and

say

one day heard

same day has no she

up

or

es- cape flee

me:

life imprisonment

escaped

prison

not where it is

within us

any

poured or

even

to

be

from

crops

up

row

still feel this

by means

re-ferred of

if one had

modern A and

to

the

here

responsibility

to

else

present;

then

cur to me that There

to say

of

water

some

about structure

other

you say about a roll

intervals,

I

and

nothing

against

changing,

but

must

say

is happening

in them

as to imply the presence

that of

a

it.

one got

caught in

excludes tone

all

not actually

Land somewhere else.

fool everyone by not

landing on

?

Not the ear

but the mind

The whole question

is

a way of living

should a

the

fourth

or could be

Several was once

of

Art.

frequently

believe

Making that particular continuity

What is being fooled

us.

the old sounds all of them that at now, but generally the

and

way

in such a

like

to

man standing on a

say

for

greater earnestness

so that

Progress

glass

108

require

the opposite.

drink have

have

but something

symbols a

finitely something,

all I

I

may be a

but

connoisseurs,

.

which, of course, is

way T begin to hear

all

just something,

that is

critics,

the ones I had thought so freely they

,

a-bout it,

the

They

anything to

the

in this way

moment able

and

but of

cannot be decided

into which

empty glass

is different

what

important questions

I

but

Unless idea

the twelve-tone

his

pathetic.

a work and

same

thinking, work

it's only

will not put

needs

the

thinking

Some people won't

the tritone

authoritative ones

a

down,

A

man he sentenced to

at

she

her woe.

a judge.

alone

and the space

becomes

I

from

weal

for

are

it

a-bout

at

music is

that he is nothing

judgments,

a woodpecker,

fructifying her,

earned his living as

an

I saw

energizing her,

or

us

I understand

seconds, One

he

said:

still invades her, Caturla,

like

the Way

someone

Cuban composer, murdered Caturla

in the

not in

but

Flee for

making

and

so are we.

contemplation the

civilization

something to say,

Earth

heaven whether

duration

while we

or

sevenths,

pedestrian

a

and and

(echo of nothing)

However,

There was a social

cardinal

heaven

include

to as

For instance:

which we need for and

Intersections,

called

another

our

of

is con-cerned

toilet paper this freedom

in

each experience

but

any-body else said to once

Beethoven

oldest nowness

silence Each one

very well,

all

the

N o w he knows

own experience

each experience is that

the

makes

are

knowing

of

It in spite of himself

need

We

air-way

se-curely possessed

dualistic terms

in

fol-

have a very serious

How

ask you:

but

stories

approach,

I have a story.

high elevation,

A

oc-

company of several

men who happened to

be walking on the

road noticed from the

distance that i n E u r o -

pean thinking, things

are seen

good or not good.

Because

as

109

we

are

in the

It is.

situation:

direct

avoid it

you may choose to

what

but

If you don't like it,

finally

silence

in return I am speaking.

requires

isn't it

At the root

of

to appreciate

to call it this

rather

extraneous

new sounds

to hear it is

piece

a

of music,

the unavoidable,

without

giving

a

which

lecture

brings us back

taking off again and

returning

Live happily

ever after.

A n d do we?

Now

7

But

to

nstant

any

one

may leave

it

desire

than

contemporary music

the

Book of Changes.

and whenever

one

wishes one

Of course, it

now it is very clearly

changing,

and the differences of

opinion are

A lady

Texas

from

said:

We

have

no

music

in

have

no

music in Texas

oldest

is the

it

that

the

nothing

that

supports

is

the

last

whom

I

will mention

There

one

it who

is

am

tables

Music

of of

sometimes

drink

a

be

a

time

to for

a

that

durations,

Changes

as

is"

gently pleasing.

what-

Now

music

contemporary

we could

is you

there

they

when it does

partakes

of

to other things

whereas

Just as going

from here

don't

have of

a

Boulez music

from

to

comsay

poetry say

as

split

no

beonly

this, we

have

but a more

or less

the

a to

miraculous said:

A

leads to nothing, single trip

is

Chinese characters

are

written

others

But if you avoid it

that's a pity

very closely

life

life

and

People say, sometimes

,

»

a piece of string

timidly

possessing neither

leads

musical instrument experiences

with two.

thing

Egypt

complex series of some

and it happens

and

or with

it are

:

just

as

one stroke because essentially a cause

but it

refor joy.

A vacant lot

and a sunset each acts

regarding

may see: ever is

simply

boring, you

like

changing

but since

decide

to

have

to

talk

you

have

nothing

110

it

let

you

For something

accepting,

is

realize

to

a-wake to the fact

If

you about

And

what someone

masterpiece little

part:

amplitudes, in your you

glass of water when

to

matter.

Going on about

free

is nothing

that

sounds,

changing

everything's

Now

it

'All

I need it the

suddenly

and

are

contemporary

have

and

saying it

spirit

durations

Pierre

but

pulsion I

clearer.

celebration

the

changing

I

and

tween

sembles

always activity

is

In other words,

so that

reason

You

supports itself

is

Now

I have noticed The

Texas. is

Each something

to.

country,

1 live in Texas

highly fractional it,

I was silent.

N o counterpoint. N o w the fifth and last

and

America a-gree or they don't

whatever.

N o melody.

may re-

forever

never return to it the people either

accepts

this about it:

has

turn to it always changing but

accepted,

that,

to

Or you may leave it

is

discipline, which,

is

Forever?

Kansas at

the

It

have

naturally,

to enough

to

say.

Ramakrishna spent an afternoon explaining that everything is God. Afterward, one of his disciples entered the evening traffic in a euphoric state and barely escaped being crushed to death by an elephant. He ran back to his teacher and asked, "Why do you say everything's God when just now I was nearly killed by an elephant?" Ramakrishna said, "Tell me what happened." When the disciple got to the point where he heard the voice of the elephant's driver warning him

several times to get out of the way, Ramakrishna interrupted, "That voice was God's voice." • • • I was surprised when I came into Mother's room in the nursing home to see that the T V set was on. The program was teenagers dancing to rock-and-roll. I asked Mother how she liked the new music. She said, "Oh, I'm not fussy about music." Then, brightening up, she went on, "You're not fussy about music either."

111

sideration, choose life here rather than on another planet or in another solar system, This lecture was written for the Beta Symposium at Wesleyan University, February 1961, while I was a Fellow at the University's Center for Advanced Studies. I was one of several members of the academic community all of whom, including President Victor Butterfield, were addressing the students on the same subject. I made my lecture on fifty-six cards, twenty-eight with texts, twenty-eight with numbers. (The numbers were numbers of seconds.) Directions for the use of the cards, followed to obtain the arrangement given below, were these: Shuffle the cards with texts. Ascertain the position of the one having the story about Goldfinger and Schoenberg. Shuffle all of the cards with numbers, reserving that having the number 120. Place that one in the numbers-deck in the position corresponding to that of the Goldfinger-Schoenberg story in the texts-deck. Using a stopwatch, read the texts in the corresponding time-lengths. This provides a twenty-minute talk. Other numbers cards could be made in order to provide a talk of another length. The typography is an attempt to provide changes for the eye similar to the changes varying tempi in oral delivery give to the ear.

feeling there were better opportunities on Earth? That we would get farther?

35 Say, through some bull-headed commitment, you get yourself into a bad situation. The wisest thing to do would be to get out of it as gracefully as possible (to order a retreat if you happened to be a general).

55 The question is not: How much are you going to get out of it? N o r is it How much are you going to put into it? But rather: H o w immediately are you going to say Yes to no matter what unpredictability, even when what happens seems to have no rela-

LECTURE

ON

COMMITMENT

tion to what one thought was one's commitment?

In order to fulfill all our commitments, we need more ears and eyes than we had originally. Besides, the old ones are wearing out. In what sense am I losing my ear or music? In every sense.

60 When I first went to Paris, I did so instead of returning to Pomona 50

College for my Junior year. Looking around, it was Gothic architecture that impressed me most. A n d of that architecture I preferred the flam-

To do? O r is it already done for us? What did we do to be born? D i d we, after con-

112

buoyant style of the fifteenth century. In this style my interest was at-

113

tracted by balustrates. These I studied for six weeks in the Bibliotheque Mazarin, getting to the library when the doors were opened and not leaving until they were closed. Professor Pijoan, whom I had known at Pomona, arrived in Paris and asked me what I was doing. (We were standing in one of the railway stations there.) I told him. He gave me literally a swift kick in the pants and then said, " G o tomorrow to Goldfinger. I'll arrange for you to work with him. He's a modern architect." SO

After a month of working with Goldfinger, measuring the dimensions of rooms which he was to modernize, answering the telephone, and drawing Greek columns, I overheard Goldfinger saying, " T o be an architect, one

There's the example of someone devoting himself to one square foot of earth, hoping

must devote one's life solely to architecture." I then left him, for, as I

before his end of time to learn what he could about everything in that small plot.

explained, there were other things that interested me, music and painting

(Apparently at no point in time or space is the wall impenetrable. Push or not, and

for instance. Five years later, when Schoenberg asked me whether I

the door opens.)

would devote my life to music, I said, " O f course." After I had been studying with him for two years, Schoenberg said, "In order to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony." I then explained to him 40

that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall

Every now and then you run into the assumption that if one person is committed

through which I could not pass. I said, "In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall."

others will commit themselves, following suit, as it were. This is implicit in the current

120

activities involving civil disobedience, to say nothing of education, apprenticeship, and the whole rigamarole. D o we then measure our success by how much we reduce

Seriously, shall we get with it?

the human race to sheeplikeness? Contrast the Far Eastern animal who on a winter night getting sleepy pulls himself up into a tree letting the snow continue to fall so that he leaves no traces.

30

45

Now we come to the subject of discontinuity in relation to commitment. Say I'm

"Music also is a means of rapid transportation." Hui-Neng, who later became the

committed. Say somebody interrupts me while I'm working. If I let him (which is

Sixth Patriarch, was dishwasher in the monastery's restaurant.

what I did when I was conceived), then I get discontinuity. I can of course say: N o ; don't bother me, thereby losing the opportunity of renaissance. 25 30 Which is wrong? The weather or our calendars? This is supposed to be the worst month; maybe everything has slipped out of position.

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I have a friend whose actions resemble overwhelming inspirations. Constantly changing in her course, she

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nevertheless does fully whatever it is she is doing, so that I would say she is committed. She would like, however, she told me, not to have two of everything, but just one, so that she could be utterly concentrated. When she told me this I was surprised, because I thought she was committed in the first place, and because I myself feel more committed the more diverse and multiplied my interests and actions become. 25 60

I never had a hat, never wore one, but recently was given a brown suede duck-hunting hat. The moment I put it on I realized I was starved for a hat. I kept it warm by putting it on my head. I made plans to wear it especially when I was going to do any thinking.

One might say, Let yourself go, but then what if he laughed at the wrong moment or

Somewhere in Virginia, I lost my hat.

in some other way was embarassing to himself and us? So we say, Dedicate yourself

20

to what you're going to do. That means you must study. When you study, do you study Y o u might say commitment is ultimate reality seen from the human point of view.

a thing or do you study with someone? Could you do it alone or would you have to

Therefore it is our daily business to find practical ways of turning the telescope around

have a teacher whose disciple you'd become? (I believe everything you say.) (The

and looking through the other end. •

entire theory of harmony, such as it is, was rediscovered by a New Englander without benefit of any contact with Europe; when it was envisaged in China, an imperial 25

Who first stepped in this puddle anyway? A n d how did this mud get to be so luscious?

decree was given forbidding it.) 45 Why was I asked to speak on commitment? D o I not resemble a grasshopper?

20

One observes everywhere alteration, sometimes slight, in a course of action. Might we not have been born, not men, but a flock of birds? (She asked me how I could explain the fact that the tall fat girl in the Theatre Class had been able to give every45

one the impression that she was a short stubby pencil.)

Let me say it schematically. This point is it. That point is you. We draw an arrow between the two points, indicating that you have dedicated yourself to it, unquestion40

ingly. That is commitment. Where does it get you? Well, there are lines from that

Our Western education teaches us caution. A n d so we hesitate before crossing the

point that is it that are arrows to every other point in space and time. A n y "it" is like

great waters. We wouldn't want, would we, to throw ourselves away? Realizing we

a Grand Central Station, or rather a space platform in orbit. Once there, you can

might have been elected President of the United States, we want somehow to settle

move out in any direction. Y o u can float through the air, as M i l a Repa did, in the

for a life not too ignoble. Well, there's always Madison Avenue. A n d it needs us to

form of a thistle. Appear in several places at the same instant (the way the mass

keep itself going.

media do). Y o u can even come back to yourself: toward the end of his life, Rama-

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krishna put a rope of flowers around his own neck and cross-legged sat in self-worship. 50 What was it actually that made me choose music rather than painting? Just because they said nicer things about my music than they did about my paintings? But I don't have absolute pitch. I can't keep a tune. In fact, I have no talent for music. The last time I saw her, Aunt Phoebe said, "You're in the wrong profession."

20 60

I'll tell you one thing: being committed as I am now to commitment is very odd. A s Gertrude Stein said, "There isn't any there there." If only it were a pearl, I could reach to my forehead and find it. A s Suzuki said: Living in the city I don't see how

We are not committed to this or that. A s the Indians put it: Neti Neti (Not this Not

you're going to do it; living in the country you'd have a chance. A n d there's his article

that). We are committed to the Nothing-in-between—whether we know it or not. ( M y

entitled Hands. (Let them get dirty. A n d who was it said something about roots—

heart goes on beating without my lifting a finger whether I'm dodging the traffic or

not just the roots but the dirt attached to them? Compare the trees sent to Nebraska

stuffing my stomach. Perspiration?)

which refused to grow simply because their roots had been cleaned up.) 40 Is it true that when a murder is committed, each one of us is the murderer? If so, then ought we not be more generous to one another?

55 30 A s he says, there are already so many sounds to listen to. Why then do we make

In order to think must I wear my thinking cap? W i l l it be sufficient just to bite my

music? Consider, he says, one's relation to music like that to, for example, animals,

lips? Or, if I am in a room, will pacing back and forth like an animal in a cage, will

weeds, stars, garbage, or people one may never meet again, provided one is not

that do the trick? Can't I just plain think?

exclusively professional keeper, breeder, disposer, or exploiter of these.

,

35 We are as free as birds. Only the birds aren't free. We are as committed as birds, and identically. 55 Must we then (in order to be taken seriously by ourselves and our fellow men), must we lie awake at night in preparation for decision? The dark night. O r is it that the 35

sun is just too bright and we by it are blinded?

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In October 1961, Gyorgy Kepes, Professor of Visual Design at M.I.T.'s Department of Architecture, invited me to write an article that would appear in a book on the module, one of a series of books devoted to problems of form that he was preparing for the publisher, George Braziller. Kepes suggested that I discuss not only the module, but rhythm, proportion, symmetry, beauty, balance, etc. I declined, saying I wasn't interested in any of those things. Kepes wrote back to say he hoped I would write a text in any case, that I might do so as the devil's advocate. Thus in a corner, I tried to figure out where Kepes possibly could have found that list of subjects (and why he had thought of asking a musician to discuss questions concerning vision). Living next door to an amateur architect who was deeply impressed by Le Corbusier, it dawned on me that the words might have come from Le Corbusier's book, The Modulor. I ran next door, picked up the book, opened it. Sure enough, there they were, all of the words, plus an account of Le Corbusier's love of music, all of which explained to me why Kepes had thought of writing to a musician. I then made use of my Cartridge Music to write a text. Cartridge Music is a number of materials with directions for their use. There are twenty ordinary non-transparent sheets having biomorphic shapes. There are several transparent plastic sheets, one having points, a second having small circles, a third having a meandering dotted line, a fourth representing the face of a chronometer. By superimposing all the transparent sheets on that ordinary one which had the same number of biomorphic shapes that Kepes had given me subjects, and by adjusting the meandering line so that it intersected at least one point within one of the shapes and made at least one entrance and exit with respect to the chronometer, I was able to make a detailed plan for writing. Points within shapes were ideas relevant to a particular subject, points outside were irrelevant ideas. The circles were stories, likewise relevant and irrelevant. The numbers on the chronometer were interpreted, not as seconds, but as lines in stenographic notebooks. I arrived, that is, at directives like the following: from line 24 to line 57, tell a story that is relevant to proportion, discuss an idea about rhythm, follow this with an idea that has nothing to do with balance. Obtaining many such directives, I then did the writing. Empty spaces follow from the method I've described. In oral delivery (I've often given this text as a lecture) the empty spaces are represented by silences. When I finished the writing, May 1962, I wrote the headnote given below. Gyorgy Kepes accepted my work and it was published in the volume on Module, Proportion, Symmetry, Rhythm in the Vision and Value Series edited by him for George Braziller, New York, 1966.

The principal characters in the following text are Le Corbusier, architect of beautiful buildings, inventor of the Modulor, and David Tudor, musician, without whom my later music and the musics of Morton Feldman and Christian Wolff, to mention only three, would never have come into being, not because of his virtuosity but because of what, when his skills are put away, he is. This text is not for him but is an homage to him. h There's virtually nothing to say about rhythm for there's no time. We've yet to learn the rudiments, the useful means. But there's every reason to believe that this will happen and not over dead bodies. When I see everything that's to the right resembles everything that's to the left, I feel just as I do in front of something where there's no center of interest at all. Activity, busyness:—not of the one who made it (his intentions had moved down to next to nothing)—perhaps a speck of dust.

We are constructed symmetrically (with the usual allowances for imperfection and ignorance with regard to what goes on inside) and so we see and hear symmetrically, that is, notice that each event is at the center of the field in which we-it is. This is not so much a democratic point of view as it is equally aristocratic. We only object when someone calls our attention to something which we were about to see originally. He mentioned going backward or to the side and combined this with the notion of progress.

The house in Los Angeles the others visited. They told about it: how the people tried to get it destroyed ("an eyesore") but that it proved to be too great a source of income. She spoke of change in her perception of light. A s I pick up my thought now I already know that it is going to slip through my fingers. Its very nature is to evade being caught. That is what thought does (not just this one: that things are in the fluent relationship of life and death, death coming only to htm who wins: nothing stops).

RHYTHM ETC. 120

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Before leaving the earth together, let us ask: How does Music stand with respect to its instruments, their pitches, the scales, modes and rows, repeating themselves from octave to octave, the chords, harmonies, and tonalities, the beats, meters,

Etc. Some time ago counting, patterns, tempi were dropped. Rhythm's in any length

and rhythms, the degrees of amplitude (pianissimo, piano, mezzo-piano, mezzo-

of time (no-structure). Aorder. It's definitely spring—not just in the air. Take as

forte, forte, fortissimo)? Though the majority go each day to the schools where

an example of rhythm anything which seems irrelevant.

these matters are taught, they read when time permits of Cape Canaveral, Ghana, and Seoul. A n d they've heard tell of the music synthesizer, magnetic tape. They take for granted the dials on radios and television sets. A tardy art, the art of Music. A n d why so slow? Is it because, once having learned a notation of pitches and durations, musicians will not give up their Greek? Children have been modern artists for years

What's marvelous is that the moon still rises even though we've changed our minds

now. What is it about Music that sends not only the young but adults too as far into

about whether or not we'll ever get there. Symmetry. Pure symmetry. Doesn't exist.

the past as they can conveniently go? The module? But our choices never reached

(He worked for several years and as he worked his technique improved but he pre-

around the globe, and in our laziness, when we changed over to the twelve-tone

ferred to keep the ineptitudes, to reveal, that is, not something perfect but something

system, we just took the pitches of the previous music as though we were moving

that showed that he had been alive while making it.) A n d yet I know when I see some-

into a furnished apartment and had no time to even take the pictures off the walls.

thing that at least makes the signs of symmetry that I am where measurements no

What excuse? That nowadays things are happening so quickly that we become

longer have real significance. (Like his flags and targets, alphabets and the cans of

thoughtless? Or were we clairvoyant and knew ahead of time that the need for

ale.) Don't tell me it's a question of mass production. Is it not rather that they want

furniture of any kind would disappear? (Whatever you place there in front of you

to establish, if not the rules of the game, at least what it is that one uses to play with

sits established in the air.) The thing that was irrelevant to the structures we

when he starts playing? (There is no need for us to agree that play is what it is, since

formerly made, and this was what kept us breathing, was what took place within

in that case Invention without which we might as well not have been born is a spoil-

them. Their emptiness we took for what it was—a place where anything could

sport.) There was a time (and I would not have minded living then even though I

happen. That was one of the reasons we were able when circumstances became

would not for any money change places with anyone past, present, or future) when,

inviting (changes in consciousness, etc.) to go outside, where breathing is child's

in Music, there was a glimmer of perfection—a relationship between the unit and

play: no walls, not even the glass ones which, though we could see through them,

the whole, down to the last detail: so elegant. How did that come about (it was an

killed the birds while they were flying.

object)? It was an icon. It was an illustration of belief. Now do you see why what we do now is not at all what it was then? Everything now is in a state of confusing us, for, for one thing, we're not certain of the names of things that we see directly in front of us. (But even if we don't know their names, can we not take our rules—

Even in the case of object, the boundaries are not clear. (I see through what you made if, that is, the reflections don't send me back where I am.) But why argue? The Indians long ago knew that Music was going on permanently and that hearing

and compasses—and measure them? No, we cannot: remember what he said about the tiger.) A n d no, again: they've required the campers to leave the park because the fires in distant places are sixteen in number.

it was like looking out a window at a landscape which didn't stop when one turned away.

Ancient history: tatami (material); tala (structure open at both ends); isorhythmic

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motet (closed structure); a rhythmic structure—micro-macrocosmic, the relation of

stop altogether—and they were not timid souls. Symmetry's not produced in music

small parts within each unit being identical with the relation of large parts within the

by doing something and then doing it backward or by doing something and then

whole—(closed structure); the Modulor (material).

something else and then back to what was first done. Exercise: lying flat on your back, your arms at your sides, your legs uncrossed, ask yourself: Among all the

She told me she'd dropped in around eleven-thirty in the evening and he said, "Why

sounds I hear, which ones are off balance?

don't you stay for dinner?" His cooking, she said, was like a performance. There was no running about the room: everything was mysteriously in the very place his hand reached when the need for it arose. There'll be centrally located pulverized Muzak-plus ( " Y o u cling to composition.") The world in a grain of sand (or is it the universe?) and vice versa. Yes, but when

performed by listeners who do nothing more than go through the room.

we say as one artist to another, "The unit and its relationship to the whole," we speak of an object, and it is well to remember that the only time the idea of movement on the part of this object entered his head, except as a farfetched analogy to music of previous times, was when he was forced to accept errors into his calculations. (Rhythm, too, is not arithmetic.) {He had not made mistakes: it was just that

There are those who think or feel that it should never have happened but (dis-

circumstances were overwhelmingly different than the idea with which he was

regarding them) the others no longer say, "Perhaps it would have been better had

attempting to cloak them. A n d his idea, actually, he said, was a tool, an instrument—

you cut it." They say instead, "I was just getting with it." Some say, "Couldn't

not an object. But it had in it all the elements (present only as measurements) that

you have made it more effective?"

the object, once made, was to have. Thus it was not a tool, for paper, once cut, is free of the knife which was used to cut it. Not a tool but an instrument, like the piano, which, used, leaves its notes scattered all over the music that was played. (Was that not why it was necessary to change it? Otherwise we would have been faced with a project like that of the Pittsburgh maker of stringed instruments who wanted to so fashion his 'cellos, violas, and violins that one wouldn't be able to hear any difference in timbre, passing from one to another. The problem is more serious: we must dispense with instruments altogether and get used to working with tools. Then, G o d willing, we'll get some work done. It can be put this way too: find ways of using instruments as though they were tools, i.e., so that they leave no traces. That's

A n d when that comes about that has not yet been heard, will we be able to say more or less than we can now about the unit and its relationship to the whole? In the interior of that space, open yet filled like a dish to the brim with sounds both gentle and terrifying, occurring at unpredictable points not only in time but throughout the space, too, will it not be as it is today, spring definitely here (or is it summer?), finally outdoors, deliciously plagued by insects, something to hear on all sides (even back of me), that anything we may think we will have had to say will as now have somehow slipped our minds?

precisely what our tape-recorders, amplifiers, microphones, loud-speakers, photoelectric cells, etc., are: things to be used which don't necessarily determine the nature of what is done. There are, of course, pitfalls, but so is one's finger when he points at the moon. What we're dealing with is not things but minds. What else?)

We are now back on the ground on our feet. The cars can no longer pass over the bridge. Last week it was a case of uncertain footing, quicksand, and, before we got out, plunging through the stream. I remember the story he told of their having to

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His response to the question was: There seems to be a tendency toward the Good. A n d what does that have to do with proportion? This, that once the measurements

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are made (not in rubber but in some inflexible material), the proper relationships

the sounds or I ? ) ; so: composition—that to be direct it must not be preceded, etc.

determined (Can you believe it? They managed to get an entire family out of the

until "which was which?" which is crossed out since nothing has yet been performed,

house simply because she raised her children in a way the other mothers didn't),

i.e., come into existence; 6) We have found ways of composing indeterminately,

a police force is in order. I quote (omissions and italics mine): "Concord between

writing on sheets of transparent plastic which can be superimposed in any ways;

men and machines, sensitivity and mathematics, a harvest of prodigious harmonies

and 7)—it took three years to realize the necessity—We have found that one nota-

reaped from numbers: the grid of proportions. This art. . . will be acquired by the

tion is all that should go on a single such sheet (no proportion = optimum flexibility

effort of men of good will, but it will be contested and attacked. . . . It must be pro-

= any proportion). This brings to mind the Russian chickens. Fragmentation. We

claimed by law." A r t this is called. Its shape is that of tyranny. The social inflexibility

began by increasing the differences between the sounds making a klangfarben-

follows from the initial conception of proportion. The line there drawn between two

melodie. More and more we left openings in our space of time. What changed matters

points becomes first a web and finally three-dimensional. Unless we find some way to get out we're lost. The more glass, I say, the better. Not only the windows, this year, even though they're small, will open: one whole wall slides away when I have the strength or assistance to push it. A n d what do I enter? (It draws me like a

radically was the willingness to stop work altogether before the structure was complete. After that there was no longer any fixed structure: just parts in any number, superimposition, and duration. Time-sense changed. Now he says: The permeation of space with sound.

magnet.) Not proportion. The clutter of the unkempt forest. (His music gave me the same experience: it was only one sound amplified and recorded on tape from the action of two people who for twenty-odd minutes rubbed metal ash trays against panes of glass. That is one way. There are as many others as there are people and there are more people now than at any other time in history. Now the increase in population is geometrical; soon again it may be a question of simple addition. There is ergo no lack of ideas which we have not yet had. Why then do other people get his ideas before he does? A short circuit? Let them mend their ways, starting wherever they are constantly from scratch.)

Let us list our reasons for having dropped all thoughts about proportion: 1) We are dealing not with the number 2 but with the number 1; 2) During any one year—

The

copperhead strikes only one hunter. The others go on about his business.

the record proves it—we worked in at least two different ways: it took in some cases

Again last night, the bird, was it blinded? Was that my purpose in killing it?

three or even four years, unburdened as wc were, to drop those habits; 3) Being slow-witted, musicians were able to observe the effects of thoughts about proportion

He made an analysis of the sound of a gong and then, in order to make a piece of

in the other arts, giving them the responsibility to do otherwise and fortunately they

music on magnetic tape, derived measurements from that analysis so that all the

were free of the problems of architecture and civil engineering (the leaking roof and

frequencies, durations, etc. would follow from these. A n d even though "anything

the collapsing structure), the problems of language (meaning of words and conven-

can be done" this project had to suffer as the other one did the introduction of ap-

tions of syntax), the problems of painting and sculpture (objectification); 4) Process,

proximations.'What we are concerned with now is quantity (we get quality auto-

pure subjectivity; 5) Consideration of the activity of listening (We do our own

matically), but we don't want to be drowned by it: we insist on being able to feel as

listening: it is not done to us)—that to be direct it must not be followed by any

though nothing were there even though we can no longer count our possessions. If,

other activity formed (intellectual) or uninformed (emotional, kinesthetic, critical,

and I don't believe it, anything like design took place before they put those rocks in

discursive), thus making possible a transformation of experience (which was which?

those gardens of sand, then it is high time one of us hunters takes time off to make a

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garden empty-minded. What would it be? Something else to study?

sists i n measuring? A n d if we begin, say at any point, do we measure each single event, how much time it takes, or do we measure the spaces between events (were there any?) or both? The Northwest Indians began as though they'd lost their

A t this moment if proportion and such matters were uppermost in our minds, har-

powers of singing and dancing (as though they were at Death's door) and then into

mony and beauty and all the rest of it, we would desire no further change (except we

them came other powers, those of another, a bird or an animal, full of the vigor of

need some rain—six fires yesterday so that two thousand were sent back to the cities

new birth. In this case no strict control was maintained. The fire was not avoided.

they came from): there was an indefinite whiteness sitting in the air around the trees

When the dancer could no longer move, others came and carried him back to the

and I was moving along at forty miles an hour. If, as is the case when I look at that

place where he had been sitting. Those in Asia also began, but meditatively, as

building near Chicago, I have the impression it's not there even though I see it taking

though they didn't know their own minds. The power of another and what other?

up space, then module or no module, it's O . K . But don't get me started counting

If, as we needn't, we give an image of it (as they did with the drone for pitches and

sheep! What we musicians are expecting to discover is not how to stop counting

the proportions of a particular tala), what will we in our impartiality give? The

(we've done that already) but how to dispense with our watches. (It's true: I'm

others, perhaps, will cite Confucius and the Southwest Indians, but even there the

always asking him, "What time is it?") It must be that eventually we will have a

Spider Goddess will not permit the passage of anyone lacking impurities. Appar-

music the relationship of which to what takes place before and after ("no" music) is

ently we are going north in our sense, that is, of what it is that we must bring in our

exact, so that one will have the experience that no experience was had, a demateriali-

arts into existence. He called it allagermanica and warned against the use of com-

zation (not of facts) of intentions. We already have this, so there's no cause for alarm,

passes. (I don't have one; the one I borrowed I only used once: to draw the

but we want it in the future available everywhere, just as it is already. They're

image of a watch—which I trust won't be necessary again. I don't have one because

beginning to work.

I know perfectly well that once a circle is drawn my necessity is to get outside of it. We begin therefore without it and it is getting urgent by the minute not to erase the clock but to drop the way we used it.)

She had a goat. She no longer does. Now they have dogs and the plan to get rid of them. The cat which she's had for a long time has no mother instinct. They're going to buy a horse. Why don't they do as with the view from the balancing rock near the top of the hill, never bothering to see it? Proportion. Aperiodic rhythm admits of periodic rhythm. (It doesn't work the other way around; that's why it has to be aperiodic, though that isn't how the decision that it should be aperiodic was reached. It was thought that another expression was possible with its own rules and so, though changed, strict control was maintained.—I'm speaking of the people on the other side of the Ocean.) The bird goes on singing repetitively

To change the subject. What do I mean when I say: He has no time-sense? Shifting

even though the flies are buzzing at the window erratically and intermittently. In all

from one situation to another at appropriate moments? For this reason we made our

of this, and I do not mention the 9,997 other events, where do we begin if work con-

work experimental (unpredictable), a) We used chance operations. Seeing that they

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were useful only where there was a definite limitation in the number of possibilities,

flexibility of mind and one is able to see wherever he looks. She objected to the

b) we used composition which was indeterminate of its performance (characterized

position of the tree on the island and we all laughed. Not the perception of the propor-

in part by parts independently made by each performer—no score). Seeing that

tions of things outside of us but the experience of identification with whatever's out-

that was useful only where there was a change of consciousness on the part of each

side of us (this is obviously a physical impossibility; that's why it's a mental

performer, c) we use performance which is indeterminate of itself.

responsibility). When we tell of something in our experience, they answer with evidence to the effect that just the same thing happened to them. Conversation should be more affluent, each remark unfolding unsuspected ideas and turns of thought. Where our sense of proportion was violated, it no longer is, just as the most common variety of anything is nowadays a rare experience. We still have a few prejudices hanging around and even if we don't remove them ourselves dear friends come in and do it for us.

What am I dealing with when I deal with proportion? Going to the store to buy something? Standardization and mass production and containers (this was his most striking evidence) for packing comestibles for distribution anywhere on the globe? But look closely. This idea (and each one of the others too in typical Mediterranean fashion) is earth-bound: the project is not about space but about packing things so efficiently that space is used up. Examples are given from ship-building and one could certainly find others in the machines that today orbit the earth. But I suspect my father is right: that space travel will be facilitated by not going against gravity but by going with the field-—not the gravitational one but the universal electrostatic one. No great expense or force will be required. One will in a wasteful American way Chopping our way through the forest trying for our own sakes to give the impression

simply move off into space inefficiently, i.e., with enough room in the vehicle so that

that our visit never took place. Our minds are already changed (and they know it:

he won't feel cramped during the journey. Furthermore, that wastefulness of space

that's why they call us cold and dehumanized); what remains to be done is to find out

will be a sine qua non: size itself will determine whether or not the unforced journey

what tools are at our disposal and how to use them so that our objective is never

is feasible. Y o u might therefore say that we meet at another point the naturalness

seen in the distance but rests continually inside each one of us, so that whenever one

of proportion, a law of nature. N o doubt there is a threshold in all matters, but once

goes, as he will, in all directions at once, it with him will go polymorphically. They

through the door—no need to stand there as though transfixed—the rules disappear.

speak of evolution. Where is there sense of proportion? Talk talk talk: is that what

This is not far away from the world of hi-fidelity which in its deadening search for

we must put up with? What is necessary is to listen to what you say so that the purpose-

perfection is unintentionally revealing to him the lively musical steps to be taken and

lessness of the listening can somehow get into what you're saying. He used the word

in detail. Needless to say, these steps are not only in the opposite direction (when you

latent and said that was when he was able to understand. How in heaven's name did

say do, I'll do don't), they are in all directions. Whenever anyone speaks informatively

anyone get the idea that proportion took place in an object outside of him? A little

with precision about how something should be done, listen, if you can, with great

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interest, knowing his talk is descriptive of a single line in a sphere of illuminating potential activity, that each one of his measurements exists in a field that is wide open for exploration.

Having this view we find fertility in whatever is inappropriate, providing it's practical. (I mean: we don't intend to just do nothing.) Exaggerate the need for no

Since the fall of 1965, I have been using eighteen or nineteen stories (their selection varying from one performance to another) as the irrelevant accompaniment for Merce Cunningham's cheerful dance, How to Pass, Kick, Fall, and Run. Sitting downstage to one side at a table with microphone, ashtray, my texts, and a bottle of wine, I tell one story a minute, letting some minutes pass with no stories in them at all. Some critics say that I steal the show. But this is not possible, for stealing is no longer something one does. Many things, wherever one is, whatever one's doing, happen at once. They are in the air; they belong to all of us. Life is abundant. People are polyattentive. The dancers prove this: they tell me later backstage which stories they particularly enjoyed. Most of the stories that are in this book are to be found below. (Thefirstthirty formed the text of a lecture titled Indeterminacy: New Aspect of Form in Instrumental and Electronic Music, which I delivered at the Brussels Fair in 1958. They were printed under ^iat title in Die Reihe No. 5 [German edition copyright © 1959 by Universal Edition A.G., English edition copyright © 1961 by Theodore Presser Company] and are here reprinted by permission.) Other stories appear elsewhere, giving, it is hoped, what adjacent articles in newspapers sometimes give: an occasion for changing one's mind.

ulterior motives: consider success of any kind a disastrous failure. (Beware of losing what isn't in your head.) They apparently lost their sense of proportion: they blew the whole thing up and yet only presented a fragment. The result is that nothing has the right size. A n obvious mistake. Yet that they're brilliant people is proven by the original and useful arrangement of numbers for the days, the weeks, and the months.

I was twelve years old. I got out my bicycle and rode over to KFWB. They said, "What do you want?" I said, "I'd like to give a weekly radio program for the Boy Scouts." They said, "Are you an Eagle?" I said, "No, I'm a Tenderfoot." They said, "Did the Boy Scouts send you?" I said, "No, I just got the idea and came over." They said, "Well, run along." So I went over to KNX. They liked the idea and arranged a time for the first program. I then went to the Boy Scouts, told them what had happened, and asked for their approval and cooperation. They said it was all right to give the program but that they would not cooperate. In fact, they never did. Every time I asked for the Boy Scout band, they said No. Individual Scouts all gave their services willingly. There were boy sopranos; trumpet, trombone, and piano soloists; and Scouts who spoke on their experiences buildingfiresand tying knots. The volume of fan mail increased each month. After two years, the organization called

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up KNX, said they'd never authorized the program, and demanded that I be put out and they be put in. They were. The band finally played. A few weeks later, KNX took the program off the air.

When Valerie Bettis first got into the movies, someone interviewed her, asked how it felt to be successful. She said, "What do you mean? I've always been a success."

Pointing out the five cars in her front yard, the cleaning lady said they were wrecks her son had accomplished during the past year, that he planned to put parts of them together to make a single usable car for her. "The only thing we don't have," she said, "is a good pair of headlights. You know it's very hard to come out of a wreck with undamaged headlights."

HOW TO PASS, KICK, FALL, AND RUN \S One evening when I was still living at Grand Street and Monroe, Isamu Noguchi came to visit me. There was nothing in the room (no furniture, no paintings). The floor was covered, wall to wall, with cocoa matting. The windows had no curtains, no drapes. Isamu Noguchi said, "An old shoe would look beautiful in this room."

You probably know the one about the two monks, but I'll tell it anyway. They were walking along one day when they came to a stream where a young lady was waiting, hoping that someone would help her across. Without hesitating, one of the monks picked her up and carried her across, putting her down safely on the other side.

The two monks continued walking along, and after some time, the second one, unable to restrain himself, said to the first, "You know we're not allowed to touch women. Why did you carry that woman across the stream?" Thefirstmonk replied, "Put her down. I did two hours ago."

^ Once when several of us were driving up to Boston, we stopped at a roadside restaurant for lunch. There was a table near a corner window where we could all look out and see a pond. People were swimming and diving. There were special arrangements for sliding into the water. Inside the restaurant was a juke box. Somebody put a dime in. I noticed that the

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music that came out accompanied the swimmers, though they didn't hear it.

One day when the windows were open, Christian Wolff played one of his pieces at the piano. Sounds of traffic, boat horns, were heard not only during the silences in the music, but, being louder, were more easily heard than the piano sounds themselves. Afterward, someone asked Christian Wolff to play the piece again with the windows closed. Christian Wolff said he'd be glad to, but that it wasn't really necessary, since the sounds of the environment were in no sense an interruption of those of the music.

^

v

One evening I was walking along Hollywood Boulevard, nothing much to do. I stopped and looked in the window of a stationary shop. A mechanized pen was suspended in space in such a way that, as a mechanized roll of paper passed by it, the pen went through the motions of the same penmanship exercises I had learned as a child in the third grade. Centrally placed in the window was an advertisement explaining the mechanical reasons for the perfection of the operation of the suspended mechanical pen. I was fascinated, for everything was going wrong. The pen was tearing the paper to shreads and splattering ink all over the window and on the advertisement, which, nevertheless, remained legible.

It was after I got to Boston that I went into the anechoic chamber at Harvard University. Anybody who knows me knows this story. I am constantly telling it. Anyway, in that silent room, I heard two sounds, one high and one low. Afterward I asked the engineer in charge why, if the room was so silent, I had heard two sounds. He said, "Describe them." I did. He said, "The high one was your nervous system in operation. The low one was your blood in circulation."

Years ago in Chicago I was asked to accompany two

dancers who were providing en- three times each. They were the Klavierstück XI by Karltertainment at a business women's dance party given in a hall heinz Stockhausen, Christian of the YWCA. After the enter- Wolff's Duo for Pianists, Mortainment, the juke box was ton Feldman's Intermission #6, turned on so everybody could Earle Brown's 4 Systems, and dance: there was no orchestra my Variations. All of these (they were saving money). pieces are composed in various However, the goings-on became ways that have in common invery expensive. One of the arms determinacy of performance. in the juke box moved a selected Each performance is unique, as record on to the turntable. The interesting to the composers playing arm moved to an exand performers as to the auditraordinarily elevated position. ence. Everyone, in fact, that is, After a slight pause it came becomes a listener. I explained down rapidly and heavily on all this to the audience before the record, smashing it. Another the musical program began. I arm came into the situation and pointed out that one is accusremoved the debris. The first tomed to thinking of a piece of arm moved another selected rec- music as an object suitable for ord on to the turntable. The understanding and subsequent playing arm moved up again, evaluation, but that here the paused, came down quickly, situation was quite other. These smashing the record. The^debris pieces, I said, are not objects, was remove^ by the third arm. but processes, essentially purAnd so on. And meanwhile all poseless. Naturally, then, I had the flashing colored lights as- to explain the purpose of having sociated with juke boxes worked something be purposeless. I said perfectly, making the whole the sounds were just sounds, scene glamorous. and that if they weren't just sounds that we would (I was of course using the editorial we)—we would do something After he finished translatabout it in the next composition. ing into German thefirstlecture I said that since the sounds were I gave at Darmstadt last Sepsounds, this gave people hearing tember, Christian Wolff said, "The stories at the end are very them the chance to be people, good. But they'll probably say centered within themselves, you're naive. I do hope you can where they actually are, not off artificially in the distance as explode that idea." they are accustomed to be, trying to figure out what is being said by some artist by means of Down in Greensboro, sounds. Finally I said that the North Carolina, David Tudor purpose of this purposeless muand I gave an interesting pro- sic would be achieved if people gram. We played five pieces learned to listen. That when

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they listened they might discover that they preferred the sounds of everyday life to the ones they would presently hear in the musical program. That that was all right as far as I was concerned. However, to come back to my story. A girl in the college there came back backstage afterward and told me that something marvelous had happened. I said, "What?" She said, "One of the music majors is thinking for the first time in her life." Then at dinner (it had been an afternoon concert), the Head of the Music Department told me that as he was leaving the concert hall, three of his students called, saying, "Come over here." He went over. "What is it?" he said. One of the girls said, "Listen."

say in the sutras: 'This is not idle talk, but the highest of truths'."

dance program given by Merce Cunningham and Carolyn Brown early one October, I noticed that it had become melodic. Christian Wolff prophesied this to me years ago. He said—we were walking along Seventeenth Street talking—he said, "No matter what we do it ends by being melodic." As far as I am concerned this happened to Webern years ago. Karlheinz Stockhausen once told me—we were in Copenhagen—"I demand two things from a composer: invention and that he astonish me."

During that Greensboro concert, David Tudor and I got a little mixed up. He began to play one piece and I began to play a completely different one. I stopped, since he is the pianist he is, and I just sat there, listening.

There was an American man from Seattle who went to lapan to buy screens. He went to a monastery where he had heard there were very special ones arid managed to get an interview with the Abbot, who, however, didn't say a word during the entire time they were together. Through an interpreter, the American made known his desires, but received no comment of any kind from the Abbot. However, very early the next morning, he received a telephone call from the Abbot himself, who turned out to speak perfect English and who said that the American could not only have the screen he wanted for a certain price, but that, furthermore, the monastery possessed an old iron gate that he could also purchase. The American said, "But what on earth would I do with an old iron gate?" "I'm sure you could sell it to a star in Hollywood," the Abbot replied.

When I told David Tudor that this talk on music was nothing but a series of stories, he said, "Don't fail to put in some benedictions." I said, "What in heaven's name do you mean by benedictions?" "Blessings," he said. "What blessings?" I said, "God bless you everyone?" "Yes," he said, "like they

We've now played the Winter Music quite a number of times. I haven't kept count. When we first played it, the silences seemed very long and the sounds seemed really separated in space, not obstructing one another. In Stockholm, howIn New York, when I was ever, when we played it at the setting out to write the orchesOpera as an interlude in the tral parts of my Concert for

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Two monks came to a stream. One was Hindu, the other Zen. The Indian began to cross the stream by walking on the surface of the water. The lapanese became excited and called to him to come back. "What's the matter," the Indian said. The Zen monk said, "That's not the way to cross the stream. Follow me." He led him to a place where the water was shallow and they waded across.

Another monk was walking along when he came to a lady who was sitting by the path weeping. "What's the matter?" he said. She said, sobbing, "I have lost my only child." He hit her over the head and said, "There, that'll give you something to cry about."

Piano and Orchestra which was means. Remain a musician. Muhaving points and one without performed September 19, 1958, sic is a means of rapid trans- any. A smaller transparent plasin Cologne, I visited each player, portation to life everlasting"? tic rectangle having five widely found out what he could do with And in a lecture I gave at Illi- spaced parallel lines is placed his instrument, discovered with nois, I added, "To life, period." over this in any position, bringhim other possibilities, and then ing some of the points out of subjected all these findings to potentiality into activity. The chance operations, ending up lines are ambiguous, referring to People are always saying with a part that was quite indefive different categories of sound that the East is the East and the in any order. Additional small terminate of its performance. West is the West and you have After a general rehearsal, during plastic squares are provided havto keep from mixing them up. which the musicians heard the ing five non-parallel lines, which When I first began to study result of their several actions, may or may not be used to Oriental philosophy, I also worsome of them—not all—intromake further determinations reried about whether it was mine duced in the actual performance garding the nature of the sounds to study. I don't worry any sounds of a nature not found in to be produced. Playing posimore about that. At Darmstadt my notations, characterized for tions are several: at the keyI was talking about the reason the most part by their intentions board, at the back of the piano, back of pulverization and fragwhich had become foolish and at a radio. One moves at any mentation: for instance, using unprofessional. In Cologne, time from one to another of syllables instead of words in a hoping to avoid this unfortunate these positions changing thereby vocal text, letters instead of sylstate of affairs, I worked with the reference of the points to lables. I said, "We take things each musician individually and the parallel lines. apart in order that they may the general rehearsal was silent. become the Buddha. And if I should let you know that the that seems too Oriental an idea conductor has no score but has for you," I said, "Remember Kwang-tse points out that only his own part, so that, the early Christian Gnostic state- a beautiful woman who gives though he affects the other perment, 'Split the stick and there pleasure to men serves only to formers, he does not control is Jesus!' " frighten the fish when she jumps them. Well, anyway, the result in the water. was in some cases just as unprofessional in Cologne as in New York. I must find a way to let Well, since Darmstadt, I've Once when I was to give a people be free without their bewritten two pieces. One in the talk at Teachers College, Cocoming foolish. So that their course of afifteen-minuteTV lumbia, I asked Joseph Campfreedom will make them noble. program in Cologne. The other bell whether I should say How will I do this? That is the is Music Walk, written during something (I forget now what question. two hours in Stockholm. Neither it was I was thinking of saying). Question or not (that is to piece uses chance operations. He said, "Where is the 'should'?" say, whether what I will do will The indeterminacy in the case of answer the situation), my prob- Music Walk is such that I cannot lems have become social rather predict at all what will happen than musical. Was that what Sri until it is performed. Chance Have you ever noticed how Ramakrishna meant when he operations are not necessary you read a newspaper? Jumping said to the disciple who asked when the actions that are made around, leaving articles unread, him whether he should give up are unknowing. Music Walk or only partially read, turning music and follow him, "By no consists of nine sheets of paper here and there. Not at all the

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way one reads Bach in public, but precisely the way one reads in public Duo II for Pianists by Christian Wolff.

A Chinaman (Kwang-tse tells) went to sleep and dreamt he was a butterfly. Later, when he awoke, he asked himself. "Am I a butterfly dreaming that I am a man?"

An Eskimo lady who couldn't speak or understand a word of English was once offered free transportation to the United States plus $500 providing she would accompany a corpse that was being sent back to America for burial. She accepted. On her arrival she looked about and noticed that people who went into the railroad station left the city and she never saw them again. Apparently they traveled some place else. She also noticed that before leaving they went to the ticket window, said something to the salesman, and got a ticket. She stood in line, listened carefully to what the person in front of her said to the ticket salesman, repeated what that person said, and then traveled wherever he traveled. In this way she moved about the country from one city to another. After some time, her money was running out and she decided to settle down in the next city she came to, to find em-

ployment, and to live there the rest of her life. But when she came to this decision she was in a small town in Wisconsin from which no one that day was traveling. However, in the course of moving about she had picked up a bit of English. So finally she went to the ticket window and said to the man there, "Where would you go if you were going?" He named a small town in Ohio where she lives to this day.

Four years ago or maybe five, I was talking with Hidekazu Yoshida. We were on the train from Donaueschingen to Cologne. I mentioned the book by Herrigel called Zen in the Art of Archery; the melodramatic climax of this book concerns an archer's hitting the bull's eye though he did so in total darkness. Yoshida told me there was one thing the author failed to point out, that is, there lives in Japan at the present time a highly esteemed archer who has never yet been able to hit the bull's eye even in broad daylight.

The Four Mists of Chaos, the North, the East, the West, and the South, went to visit Chaos himself. He treated them all very kindly and when they were thinking of leaving, they consulted among themselves how they might repay his hospitality. Since they had noticed that he

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had no holes in his body, as they each had (eyes, nose, mouth, ears, etc.), they decided each day to provide him with an opening. At the end of seven days, Kwang-tse tells us, Chaos died.

Now and then I come across an article on that rock garden in Japan where there's just a space of sand and a few rocks in it. The author, no matter who he is, sets out either to suggest that the position of the rocks in the space follows some geometrical plan productive of the beauty one observes, or not satisfied with mere suggestion, he makes diagrams and detailed analyses. So when I met Ashihara, the Japanese music and dance critic (his first name escapes me), I told him that I thought those stones could have been anywhere in that space, that I doubted whether their relationship was a planned one, that the emptiness of the sand was such that it could support stones at any points in it. Ashihara had already given me a present (some table mats), but then he asked me to wait a moment while he went into his hotel. He came out and gave me the tie I am now wearing.

An old rabbi in Poland or some place thereabouts was walking in a thunderstorm from one village to another. His

health was poor. He was blind, covered with sores. All the afflictions of Job were his. Stumbling over something he fell in the mud. Pulling himself up with difficulty, he raised his hands towards heaven and cried out, "Praise God! The Devil is on Earth and doing his work beautifully!"

Morris Graves used to have an old Ford in Seattle. He had removed all the seats and put in a table and chairs so that the car was like a small furnished room with books, a vase with flowers and so forth. One day he drove up to a luncheonette, parked, opened the door on the street side, unrolled a red carpet across the sidewalk. Then he walked on the carpet, went in, and ordered a hamburger. Meanwhile a crowd gathered, expecting something strange to happen. However, all Graves did was eat the hamburger, pay his bill, get back in the car, roll up the carpet, and drive off.

A woman who lived in the country was asked how cold it had been the previous winter. "Not very cold," she replied. Then she added, "There were only three or four days when we had to stay in bed all day to keep warm."

An Irish hero whose mother had died was required by his stepmother to set out on

a journey to an island beneath the sea and to bring back some golden apples he would find there. Should he fail to return within a year, he would lose his right to the throne, relinquishing it to one of his stepbrothers. For his journey he was given a miserable shaggy nag. No sooner had he set out than the nag said, "Look in my ear. You will find a metal ball Throw it on the path ahead of us and we will follow it wherever it goes." Unhesitatingly the prince did this, and so, proceeding by chance, they passed through many perilous situations. Finally, on the point of success, the horse said to the Prince, "Now take your sword and slit my throat." The Prince hesitated, but only for a moment. No sooner had he killed the horse than, lo and behold, it turned into a prince, who, except for the acquiescence of the hero, would have had to remain a miserable shaggy nag.

A young man who was concerned about his position in society and who was about to get married made his wife-to-be promise not to indulge further in kleptomania. (She had, for instance, once gone into the Piggly-Wiggly, taken a number of items, attempted an exit without paying, been stopped and told item by item what she had stolen, given up those mentioned, crossed the street, sat down on the curb, and eaten a jar of peanut butter the attendant had failed to notice.) She

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promised her husband-to-be she would never steal anything again. But years later, when they were getting divorced, she told him that when they went to the jeweler's to get the wedding ring, she had left him for a moment while he was considering the relative merits of two rings and, not being observed, had acquired a wrist watch. This particular girl was a great beauty. When a friend of hers who had been a tutor in the Japanese royal family was giving a lecture in Santa Maria, California, she was at the back of the capacity audience standing on a tabter wearing high heels, fur coat, and a red rose in her black hair. At one point in his lecture, when the speaker's eye fell on this girl in recognition, she opened her coat, showing herself to be stark naked.

Some years ago on May 30, Mary Fleming noticed a strange amanita growing near her house in Upper Nyack. She picked the plant, volva and all, and put it to dry in the sun on top of her station wagon. A little later before driving into town she took the mushroom off the car and put it up on an outside window sill, also in the sun. When she did this, she may have been thinking, consciously or unconsciously, of putting the mushroom out of the reach of her cats. She had, at the time, nine of them. At any rate, when she returned home after having

run an errand in Nyack, two Siamese cats, Poom Poom, a mother, and One Yen, her kitten, were busy eating the amanita. Three other cats, not Siamese, were standing nearby interested in what was going on. Only about a third of the amanita remained uneaten. Six hours later, the Siamese became ill. They vomited and had diarrhea. Instead of walking, they staggered around. They suffered peristalsis. Eventually they were quite unconscious. They couldn't move at all. When Mary Fleming took them to the doctor, they were "like two fur boards." They were given injections of atropine. They recovered completely. Twelve days later there was a thunderstorm. One Yen, the kitten, died in the driveway. Autopsy showed that the cause of death was heart attack. The mother, Poom Poom, still lives but has never had another litter. That's one story. Another version is quite different. It wasn't a cat that died in the driveway, but a dog. What happened was that five days before the thunderstorm, Mary Fleming went to Trinidad where her husband was collecting snakes. She stayed there for a month. Back home in July she found that three of the cats that had recovered from the mushroom poisoning were sick. This means —since One Yen was already dead—that at least two of the ordinary cats not only observed the Siamese eating the amanita but themselves partook. 2 —1 + 2 = 3. The three cats who were sick in July were taken to the

doctor who said they had enteritis. He was able to cure them. The cause of One Yen's death is unknown. Perhaps it was the atropine. Since Mary Fleming was in Trinidad there was no autopsy. One thing is certain: Poom Poom is sterile.

Muriel Errera's house is next to the Royal Palace in Brussels. She said she'd like to give a dinner party and would invite whoever I wanted her to, plus, of course, her friends. Since I was staying in the country south of the city, I asked whether she'd like me to bring along some mushrooms. She said certainly. I arrived at the party with several baskets. I forget what all I had found, but one basket was nothing but Lepiota caps fit for the people next door. I was taken in an elevator four flights up to a small improvised kitchen. After making certain that everything I would need for cooking was available I went back downstairs. I met the guests and had some drinks and then, after the first few courses, went upstairs again, this time to cook the mushrooms. It didn't take long. I got myself and the pans into the elevator and pushed the button. I no sooner left the fourth floor than the lights went out and the elevator stopped running. I lit a match and looked for an emergency button, but there wasn't any. Feeling hurried, I began beating on the elevator door and shouting. After quite some time,

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I heard some voices, and after that the voice of my hostess. She said that word was being sent to the contractor who had installed the elevator and did I want something to read? I said that it was quite dark and that I didn't require any reading matter. The contractor never arrived, but eventually all of the servants, including the cook, the chauffer, and the doorman, went down to the basement and by their joint efforts sent me inch by inch back up to the fourth floor. The first thing I did was to reheat the mushrooms. As we walked downstairs together, Muriel Errera asked me not to mention the incident to any of the guests. When I arrived with the frying pans in the candle-lit dining room, every one was eating dessert.

Last October when it was terribly dry I went to visit the Browns in Rochester. I didn't take along any mushroom books, even though I knew that Nobby and I would spend most of our time walking through the woods. No matter where he lives he gets ahold of those United States Coast and Geodetic Survey quadrangle maps. He studies them carefully and with their aid explores the countryside conscientiously. He is not a botanist. He is more of a hiker. He likes a good view and solving the puzzle of how to get out of the woods once he is in them. He took me to a swampy area ordinarily no

doubt impassable but because of the drought quite easy to explore. There to my surprise we discovered a white Tricholoma growing in rings larger than any I had ever seen before. This particular species was new to me. It appeared in every respect desirable and it was not acrid to the taste. We gathered quite a lot and I decided to telephone W. Stephen Thomas, tell him about the mushroom, and learn from him what species it was. He answered the telephone but didn't recognize the fungus from the information I gave him. He said that there was a scheduled walk the very next day and that someone in the Rochester Club might know my plant. No one did, but one person had Groves along, which I consulted and was pleased to learn described my Tricholoma. It was irinum, edible and delicious. I served it to a number of students from the University who came to the Browns' the following day for dinner. A week later I was home again and got to cataloging my mushroom books. I came across a reprint of an article by Alexander Smith entitled Tricholoma irinum. Smith tells in detail how for years he has found and eaten this mushroom without any ill effects, how he never had any compunction about giving it to others to eat until two people were seriously poisoned by it. He studied their case quite carefully since he is himself so often sickened by fungi but not by this

one. He came to the conclusion that the mushroom, nothing else that had been eaten or drunk, was indeed responsible.

it wants to do but what he wants it to do. People in the near future will not suffer from schizophrenia; they will simply be schizophrenic if and when they have the desire. Certain tribes in Siberia Life is changing. One of trade several sheep for one the ways I'm trying to change Amanita muscaria and use the mine is to get rid of my desires mushroom for orgiastic practi- so that I won't be deaf and ces. The women chew the raw blind to the world around me. mushroom and the chewed pulp When I mention my interest in is mixed with blueberry juice. mushrooms, most people immeThis is drunk by the men and diately ask whether I've had any is productive of hallucinations. visions. I have to tell them that It also changes the relation I'm very old-fashioned, practibetween the ego and social cally puritanical, that all I do ideals. Thus, the urine of those is smoke like a furnace—now who have been affected by the with twofiltersand a coupon in mushroom is in high demand every pack—and that I drink and is drunk with pleasure, for coffee morning, noon, and night. it contains a sufficient amount I would also drink alcohol but of the drug to continue its wild I made the mistake of going to effects. The Vikings who went a doctor who doesn't permit it. berserk are thought to have done The visions I hear about don't so by means of this same mush- interest me. Dick Higgins said room. he ate a little muscaria and it made him see some rabbits. Nowadays we hear of biochemical experiments using Valentina Wasson ate the divine Amanita muscaria or other mushrooms in Mexico and hullucinatory mushrooms or the imagined she was in eighteenthdrugs synthesized in imitation century Versailles hearing some of them—experiments in which Mozart. Without any dope at professors, students, or criminals all other than caffeine and nicobecome temporarily schizo- tine, I'll be in San Francisco phrenic, sometimes for the tomorrow hearing some of my novelty of it, other times for own music and on Sunday, God purely scientific purposes. Just willing, I'll awake in Hawaii as we soon will travel to the with papayas and pineapples for moon and other earths, and add breakfast. There'll be sweetto our telephone conversations smelling flowers, brightly the practice of seeing one colored birds, people swimming another while we speak, so one in the surf, and (I'll bet you a will do with his mind what he nickel) a rainbow at some point now does with his hair, not what during the day in the sky.

The thought has sometimes occurred to me that my pleasure in composition, renounced as it has been in the field of music, continues in thefieldof writing words, and that explains why, recently, I write so much. I know however that sometime soon I will renounce that too. I admired Buckminster Fuller when he began his lecture at the YMHA in New York in the spring of 1966 by saying that he never read prepared texts for he didn't want to do for his audiences what they individually could do for themselves, i.e., read. Having these feelings, and invited by the Once Group to Ann Arbor with David Tudor for their Festival in September 1965, I decided to improvise a talk. David Tudor had collected a number of throat-, lip-, and other microphones and various electronic components for modulating sound. He prepared a sound-system having six channels for which I was to be the sound-source. He had the assistance of Gordon Mumma, composer and founder of a company that manufactures electronic music components called Cybersonics, Inc. I wrote down the topics given below I was interested in talking about. (I had intended that there would be one hundred and twenty-eight subjects, but I didn't get this number written.) I also asked Robert Ashley, composer and one of the Once Group to converse with me and/or to elect for that purpose anyone else in the audience who was willing to do likewise. He conversed for awhile, then left; shortly Bob Raushenberg appeared and we talked. Very little of anything that was said, due to the manipulations of the sound-system by David Tudor and Gordon Mumma, was comprehensible to the audience. The performance was an entire evening (one and a half to two hours). It took place under the night sky on the roof of a building, all floors of which, including the one we were on, were ordinarily devoted to the parking of automobiles. With the help of several others, I arranged the folding chairs so that they were not in rows but, to all appearances, haphazardly placed. I was surprised to see shortly after the performance began that the audience had arranged itself in rows. They were seated facing in the direction of the roofed-over stairwell, one flight above them at one corner of the building, where David Tudor, Gordon Mumma, Robert Ashley (later Robert Rauschenberg) and I were seated in the midst of electronic equipment. The loud-speakers surrounded the audience. After it became evident what they were "in for," quite a number of people present went away. Those who remained enjoyed themselves, sat in pairs and informal circles, sent delegates off to the town below. These returned with refreshments, six-packs of beer, etc. At the suggestion of Andrea Chiyo,film-maker,my lists are not printed in columns or rows but are scattered on the following pages, somewhat as we had arranged the chairs in Ann Arbor.

TALK I 140

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Pecies

Good morning Miss Dove Letter to Boucourechliev; stamps

Ser er{

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Rhythm Etc.

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Tulane interview

Trees

B e t s

North Pole changing

Judgment/curiosity

Ichiyanagi

y

Kaprow/Theatre Piece

Diary Cough/clear throat

What's a score?

Writing vs. music

Williams Mix LSD

Sea urchins/vibraphone

Amanita muscaria

I-Ching

Advertisements Changes in breakfast

Aaron Copland

French/language

9 s? o

Community

ft-

Jasper Johns

Date book

Name-dropping/omission of names

Duchamp

Voice as poetry

N . Y . C . / I n d i a . Shocking?

Telephone book

"More like a cookie"

Student of weather

Newspaper/discuss

Paula's letter

Food-gathering

Changes in aquariums

Charleston, West Virginia

Letters

Taxi driver press charges

Packaging/Indian problem

s

Cranberry jelly r e

*c

Mushroom book/stories

t

eat

142

Judith's telephone/interruption

143

Change of citizenship

Visit of strangers/drive to A n n Arbor

Housing service/Fuller

/

Indian designs: floral, geometric

Numbers of people/Emma Lake

N . Y . C . F a i r / S . F . Fair

Life in air: as though in air

Perform on subway platforms Coincidence/example?

Jay Watt/to die in six months/cats Maine/afraid we knew too much

Sixty-one global services

Pies in Canada/no food distribution

M

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h

r

o

o

likes and dislikes

m

i n g

/ b o w i n g (of string instruments)

n

Variations V ,00n

Now that the following text is written (it was published in the summer of 1967 by the Something Else Press, New York City, as a part of their Great Bear Pamphlet Series, using a color structure which followed a suggestion by Dick HigginsJ, I plan, circumstances permitting, to write further on the same subject. Just before Christmas I visited my mother who lives in a nursing home. (Two years ago she suffered a severe heart attack which left her physically helpless.) I told her I'd written three texts on world improvement. She said, "John! How dare you? You should be ashamed!" Then she added, "I'm surprised at you." I asked her, in view of world conditions, whether she didn't think there was room for improvement. She said, "There certainly is. It makes good sense."

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What we need to know now is: How many services do we require? . . o diatonic effect Coplandtungi'. n o d ! n

DIARY: HOW T O IMPROVE T H E WORLD ( Y O U WILL O N L Y M A K E M A T T E R S WORSE) C O N T I N U E D 1967

^ Oil.

VS. citizens are six per cent

of world's population consuming sixty

payment required, many credit cards/if none, one

per cent of world's resources.

Had

Americans been born pigs rather than men, it would not have been different.

Mit**** on

rican r « A.tne

Jinding one of them acceptable, people

"One thing leads to another"

•>ay, "you're not like an American."

She said people (in-out) (sameness-new)

Give «P equation of work-money-

Undirected variation

global services (and the notion virtue

scrvices'd bring about: global living without war) said: Yes, ul course,

•„sorea^

******

A6

s

Mara*

$cv t*

that's right. to happen?

But how is it going

Deep drilling: a slight

angle and without meaning to you're taking oil from under someone else's

>e

property. Argument vs. agreement Theatre in the round/audience in the round

Erik Satie's Venetian

gold-merchant: He hugs the bag of old, takes some pieces out, kisses them,

144

145

thoughtlessness.

After other financial-erotic acts, not being able

told, unused areas of the brain.

to resist, he gets into the bag himself.

LXII.

We

open our eyes and ears seeing life each day excellent as it is.

spent hunting for non-synthetic foods.

(yoga, zazen, etc.) to come by.

sciences), paying attention to things

Having this realization, we gather

already made (classics, history, humanities).

nature, in order to make this intolerable Ivan

answer is useful only when it leads to new human understanding .... Widespread use of graphic inputs and outputs with computers will bring about a major

talked about Gaudi.

scale that only society as a whole can undertake them."

people blown through tunnels downhill from Boston to New York.

Laura

said that driving to the apartment from the office Mies was He had said that there are

too few good people in the world.

(Duchamp

talking about the human mind pointed

out how poorly it works.)

Isolate aspect

of human nature which brought it about no one (not even those devoted to his work) knows how many pieces of Satie's Furniture Music were written or where they are.

Call it collective

146

Effortless slowing

down: tunnel goes uphill.

Asked about

religion he said he never said anything against it: "It's the only thing that

admired the Gaudi buildings in and near

misanthropic.

Effortless speed

(seven hundred and fifty miles per hour):

We

Mies van der Rohe

Barcelona and the Park Giiell.

:

a major extent on constructive

increase in scientific, engineering, and LX1II.

Waddington " . . .

enterprises . . . which are on such a large

Sutherland: " . . . it is not enough for 7he

Plastics.

the richness of individual life depends to

energies, ours and the ones of

educational productivity."

At

(painting, theatre, etc. and the

without art it would have been difficult

a computer to print an answer.

Days

Other days spent making something inedible

This

Robots.

LXIV.

sunset becoming artists in the kitchen.

realization no longer needs art though

world endurable.

They

should be put to work.

Coming out of it somewhat later,

he discovers he has a backache.

There exist, we're

keeps people in line." art?

What about

Is art, formerly religion's servant, now, without our realizing it, a kind of policing activity? secular morality.

We need a purely LXV.

Pia Gilbert,

born in southern Germany, got in a taxicab in New York City. The driver said, "I'm a Black Muslim." replied, "I'm sorry to hear it."

She

"You

don't believe in the truth?" isn't the truth." Kegroes?" a Negro?"

"That

"You don't like

"What makes you think I'm not What it is is a

field.

Looks

like we'll have networks in that field.

Lines crisscrossing on a

147

multiplicity of levels.

she explained, she and people she knew

There'll be, as

ever, the nothing-in-between.

Wrist

had suffered at the hands of others.

She

said that by means of things they like

watches with alarms that tell us as we travel around when we should eat (not when the airline hostess gives us

and acquire people position themselves with respect to society.

Duchamp: Property

food, but when, according to our own

is at the base of it.

systems, we should have it).

owning property radical social change is

New function

for doctors: adjusting our wrist alarms.

LXVI.

impossible.

"They dance the world as

it will be . . . is now when they dance."

Technique.

(Tie lost interest in the

national attachments. various parts of the world.

Begging: difficult

justify your government's use in Vietnam saturation bombing of the entire

His eyes are sheep's eyes; his Decided not to give

country with jelly-gasoline and phosphorus?

a bubbling mass.

death, asking for a little money, enough

and hearing a lecture on heaven, people

Asked the Spanish doctor

would choose the lecture.

what she thought about the human mind in a world of computers.

She

said computers are always right but life isn't about being

right.

Electronic Sketching.

Engineers

Focus Light on Screen to Design Visually via Computer.

Pia's

defence of property was touching.

148

R a m a k r i s h n a said:

G i v e n a choice between going to heaven

so he could sit in a corner, smoke his LXVII.

Napalm and phosphorus

burn until the victim is reduced to

letter Satie'd written shortly before

pipe).

Bert rand

of poison chemicals and gas, the

children producing bodies that'll attract

Then did (after reading

3. Composed

Russell asks American citizens: Can you

In India, parents maim

mind's superb.

2. At home

of elements gathered from all or

Tie removed himself from

him a penny.

Definition

in any country; without local or

performances. He went to the

pity.

LXV'lll.

Belonging to all the world.

tape-music center, its experiments and

the others.)

In which case

of the word "cosmopolitan": 1.

7he use of drugs to facilitate

profession.

>int where no one

we could keep God.

religious experience is against the stream

Southwest desert.

Or taxation could

has any money at all.

Each thing in the world asks us, "What

of the times.

on pieces of money. be augmented to the

It's the other way around.

makes you think I'm not something you like?"

W e ought either to get

rid of God or to find Another W h o doesn't permit mention of trust in H i m

Discipline.

Ultimately it's not a question of taste.

Until you give up

LX1X.

Sir Charles Dodds:

" . . . assume that cancer and As

cardiovascular problems are solved.

149

. . . We shall see institutions filled

eliminating the practices involving

with scientists of many biological

guilt/aggression/conscience, "turning our

disciplines devoting their time to a

backs," John R. Seeley, "on an anal and

study of the ageing process."

He says

phallic world to bring into being a

no evidence exists that age

reign of genitality (enjoyment by

accompanied by degeneration is or isn't a natural process.

Every

death may have been unnatural, due to extraneous causes.

others must be a condition of one's own enjoyment)."

Not

Fire,

unpleasing additions to water, but the subtraction from it of noxious

Lecture series o n

W a r ( a summit s e r i e s ) : lectures to be given b y heads of states s a y i n g

elements.

American school-teacher in

Japan, having been assured she could have a private bath, told attendant she'd

whatever they w i l l on the general subject of fighting and w h y one does or doesn't do it.

LXXI.

Disgust.

Any

proverbs that pass through our heads

arranged to be alone. here to see that you are."

He said, "I'm Art instead of

being an object made by one person is a

should be examined in a spirit of

process set in motion by a group of

skepticism, their opposites in some

people.

cases reinforced, e.g., instead of

someone saying something, but people doing

"A rolling stone gathers no moss" establish "He doesn't let the grass grow under his feet."

OCX. Something

Art's socialized.

things, giving everyone (including those involved) the opportunity to have experiences they would not otherwise have had.

needs to be done about the poslal services.

It isn't

Indians in

them

Saskatchewan, farmers in Vhle de

Either thai or we should stop assuming just became we mailed something il will get

Trance, they've all forgotten what

where we sent it.

wild plants are edible.

Not ju§t heads of

state for the Lecture Series on War. but heads of corporations too.

Let it

become household knowledge that being employed by such and such a company is no different from being drafted for such and such a battlefront.

"Now's the time.

Never this opportunity again (plans for centennial celebration: funds available)."

Including in our

awareness whatever's/whoever's exterior to our focus of attention.

In this way

150

J was

talking about this lois with Pere Patrice.

Jte said they've also

jorgolten how to sing.

LXXI1.

The

children have a society of their own. They have no need for ours.

A t the

airport Ain said he came simply to see whether his mother was all right. Mtimma's music (Mesa) for Cunningham's dance called Place.

Sitting in the

audience I felt afterward as though I'd been rung through a ringer.

151

Then had

to nie

easy for me to do. over the place. being repeated.

Wrong notes all

Tonight i

Comte (Syteme de Politique Positive, second volume). Individuality. Out of the darkness of psychoanalysis

program's

I've practiced.

I'll be

deaf and blind.

into sunny behavioral psychology (people picking up their couches a n d

Experimentation.

walking).

Summit lecture series on War: not to be given in one city, but via a global Telstar-like facility, each receiving set

will throw them away (they should have

throughout the world equipped with a device permitting hearing no matter what speech in one's own tongue. Progress.

U.S. highway diner: now that

I haven't eaten the potatoes, they been thrown away before being served). Rich, we become richer.

LXXIII.

N o way once it

begins to impede accumulation.

Since for long we've been

Universe.

They've put the cart

saying that money is the root of all evil,

before the horse i they're better about

we should gel rid of it, lock, stock and

publicity than they are about what they

barrel.

Take all the people who are

Stand them up.

publicize

Jammed together, they'd

fit into the New York City subway system.

faces of the forty or so men (industrialists) who rule the world.

" O h , " he said, " W e

don't do any worse than the other

A l l of her c h i l d r e n were nude, twelve of them.

doctors: it's just that y o u can see the results of our w o r k . " mentioned Lieh-tzu.

Portuguese lady

fire.

Instead of

( r e i n c a r n a t i o n ) regeneration of each

astonishing those who saw him, was of stone, walked through

" S h e is the solution of a

A suite for two.

transformation into other f o r m s

out of stone cliff through fire, "What?"

" S h e should be studied," D u c h a m p said.

problem."

Story: man, walking

asked how he did it.

Sometimes the truth

a N e w York .newspaper showing the

I asked the skin-doctor why skin-doctors do such poor work.

LXXV.

gets out: years ago the double-spread i n

now living in the world, McLuhan told me.

Came out

individual.

Precedent:

constant

r e m a k i n g of Shinto temples i n Japan.

"I know

(With

his t h u m b n a i l T u d o r kept the

nothing," he said, "about either of

bass-string i n v i b r a t i o n . )

those two things."

changes i n design: invention a p p l i e d to a

Ephemeralization. into the air. in heaven."

LXXIV.

Away from the earth

More with less: van der Rohe (aesthetics); Fuller (society of

world men).

l i v i n g body.

Or: "on earth as it is

Nourishment via odors, life

maintained by inhalation: Auguste

152

Include

(Electronics:

reincarnation without hiatus of death.

Remembrandt.

We have everything we

used to have.

The M o n a Lisa's still

with us, for instance.

O n top of w h i c h we

have the M o n a Lisa with a mustache.

153

Her playing w h i c h had been superb became

W e have, so to speak, more than we need. LXXV1.

Electric clothing. changed.

The program was

We need news.

news: good news and news that's neither good nor bad.

merely correct.

playing of something that hadn't been written.

Heads of state

same problem. introduced.

not be able to promote national objectives. So, we telephoned to

find out whether the bus wat coming, even Figue'ras.

and inscription at the base of the

Association prevented general

He

the upper body in relation to the legs, an original way of putting one foot in front of the other). happen? control.

Grandfather was still alive.

Out of

Grandfather's urine he had studied some apple juice that Grandmother had given the hospital messenger when he tame to pick up the sample.

Will we do it or will it be Unemployment.)

Responsibility undefined. Climate

Stravinsky's objection to

much like, though more interesting than, Absence of modernity's

effect of Schoenberg's accepting tradition, hook, line and sinker. Our concerts LXXVIII.

T h e rehearsals

continued and more concerts were given.

154

Circa

male, sixty, seventy kinds of female. He had actually gotten slides showing the passage of the gene from one cell to the next. Reconstitution.

Destruction.

(What we want is very

little, nothing, so to speak.

We just

want those things that have so often

celebrate the fact concerts're no longer necessary.

Get it,

one hundred and seventy-five kinds of

Schoenberg's music: it isn't modern (too

Sounds everywhere.

LXXIX.

she said, so it's unknown which parent conceiving will hear the child.

(How will it

Brahms'.)

Turned out

that instead of analyzing

When he walks

going to make it (a strange orientation of

done to us?

The

doctor telephoned to ask whether

LXXVII.

across the room, you wonder whether he's

Illinois into Sweden.

American Medical

marketing of these products.

The Catalan inscription

refuses to give up.

alcohol i Cowell prejerred it to

hormones.

howl, the eye primitively painted with

was black: I see thee.

Dads cold remedy (a

cure-all combining menthol, thymol tn

introduction to blood stream of vitamins,

Looking for corduroy

suit, noticed chamber pots, each with eye

brilliant colors.

R a n d o m elements

whiskey), Bad's inhalor for cfuick

though the appointed hour had not yet struck.

Computer-made music

(synthesized B l u e M o o n ) presented

lecturing on war (knowing they are speaking to people all over the world) will We were impatient.

It was necessary to

suggest a certain sloppiness, the

Not just bad

been promised or stated: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity; Freedom of this and that.)

Clothes for entertainment, not

755

because of shame.

P r i v a c y to become a n

Gaulle, etc.

unusual rather than expected experience.

deal (that the lights will turn on,

G i v e n disinfection,

the telephone will work, etc.), what we

sanitation, removal of social concerns re defecation, urination. self-consciousness.

want is a comfortable bed (each one

No

of us has a different notion oj

Living like animals,

becoming touchable.

LXXX.

comfort), fresh air, delicious

Ancient

water, fine food, wine (there again, we

Chinese imperial decree: Burn the books!

differ).

To have the books that are not

Into the night: the days to come. B a r b a r a said she'd heard the political

yet written, prohibit reading the ones on shelves.

situation i n some S o u t h A m e r i c a n country

Fire takes place of dust

being what it was (bizarre, dishonest a n d

producing beneficent ashes.

Tried

meaningless), a gorilla i n the zoo was

conversation (engineers and artists).

nominated and elected President.

Found it didn't work. At the last minute, our profound differences (different attitudes toward time?) threatened performance.

We now expect a good

LXXXII.

In music it was hopeless to

think in terms of the old structure (tonality), to do things following old

What changed

methods (counterpoint, harmony), to use

matters, made conversation possible,

the old materials (orchestral

produced cooperation, reinstated

instruments).

one's desire for continuity etc.,

scratch: sound, silence, time,

were things, dumb inanimate things (once

activity.

speech, action).

Begin again, assuming abundance,

Say lecture series

unemployment, a field situation,

Rule that

multiplicity, unpredictability,

summit meetings must be made public via TV, satellite, the works.

immediacy, the possibility of

Increase frequency

of summit meetings.

One way or

participation.

another, that is, let the game be shown for CXXX1.

partitions.

Shirley

Spaces without

Noticing what the others

are doing (they also think). no thought to graduation.

Qenther's arranging for me to receive the Xaiser Reports.

Schools w e ' l l live

in (their architecture).

what it is to those having time and interest to observe it.

In society, no amount of

doctoring up economics/politics will help.

in our hands they generated thought, on war cannot be arranged.

We started from

Giving

We know it's a

melody but it's one we've not yet

you don't pay for them.

sung.

7hey just come to you in the mail.

Speakers for lecture series: Mao

Power of momentum.

LXXXIII.

There are those of course who have no time

Tse-Tung, Ho Chih Minh, some African

for improving the world.

Bushman, Nikita K., LBJ, Charles de

struggling to keep it going.

156

157

!

They are

Disciplines

that require exercise.

Lunch i n C h i c a g o :

equipped with transmission means

She asked me whether it was true that art no longer interested me.

enabling people to vote on whether or not a

I said I

proposed step or steps should be taken.

thought w e ' d done it (opened our eyes, our e a r s ) . society.

D e n i a l of what one's believed i n .

What's urgent is

Amplification of the sound of feet,

Not fixing it but changing it so

it works.

Self-service.

feet one sees w a l k i n g .

Time for anger.

Miscegenation: generation of a lasting biochemical change.

line, reassembling him at his

We gave up

destination.

judgments, substituted poetry.

you wanted it to go.

Called the desk.

LXXXIV.

compressed air.

"If you and Daddy

Jhey give

we're on the ground (trip or no

Y o u just Base human

nature on allishness (soon enough global LXXXV.

can see where they're going. yet: politicians take no political Politicians (via T V ) simply Receiving sets

158

These razor darts

slice the villagers to r i b b o n s .

Maki

thinks H a w a i i ' s another part of Japan.

Portugal thinks of A n g o l a

world, is determined to keep it free, U.S.A.-determined.

television cameras, so people everywhere

make suggestions.

h u n d r e d m i l l i o n slivers of razor-sharp

U . S . A . thinks the Free W o r l d is U.S.A.'s

Political steps

restricted to those taken in front of

steps alone.

V i e t n a m , the most densely populated, one

not as a colony but as Portugal.

selfishness will become something to think about).

I n one p r o v i n c e of N o r t h

thirteen months.

Changing things radically, change that one mind.

steel).

steel have fallen i n a p e r i o d of

We have only one mind (the one we therefore, is simple.

thousand slivers of razor-sharp

I

Pretty soon they'll do the same even when

LXXXVI.

T h e lazy dog ( a b o m b c o n t a i n i n g ten

North Pole is on the move:

us food because we're traveling by air.

share).

unused, it gets recharged).]

"I'd go back to

used to be in the Philippines.

trip).

electrical: getting home, p l u g i n c a r :

His mother said, "Where

nature."

Insisted on

private transportation ( p o s s i b l y

with you and I'm not going to go would you go then?"

Graduated speeds for

Synchroveyor travel.

get a divorce, I'm not going to go with Daddy."

Northwest plans

for shooting people through tunnels with

They said there was no cause for alarm.

Pittsburgh S k y b u s : push a

button: following a path, bus goes where

Fire engines in the street below. Smoke in the halls.

[Talked about

disintegrating passenger at one end of

The possibility

of conversation resides in the Better

impossibility of two people having the same experience whether or not their attention is directed one-pointedly.

An

ancient Buddhist realization (sitting

159

in different seats).

LXXXVII.

Exhaustion.

Sleep disturbed by dream.

Said we were

to have regular tours each year, four of

government forced literally tens of thousands of young girls into camps for U.S. troops.

them, each to last four months. First o n e : performances i n A l a s k a , North Pole, Russia, Finland.

Parking at

the super market, she changed her

Armistice November Eleventh.

Armistice?

When's Second World War's

Need three hundred and sixty-three more wars arranged so each ends on different day, entire year

plan, gathering lamb's quarters, mushrooms,

becoming one Armistice after another.

and horseradish she'd noticed growing wild

Wars cold rather than hot.

outside.

Earth a city as Paris w a s : people seen i n love on the streets. Electric clothes rechargeable at public couches, couches provided with

adjustable domes, domes raised or lowered according to the weather, cataclysmic from a distance, distance provided b y Disease removed, the use of faeces, animal and human, to enrich the earth from the point of human well-being, non-fluent factors in the exchange between man and universe (detergents,

("Hands.")

A new

The enjoyment of "dirt".

LXXXVIII.

The woods: finding a

cabin nobody's living in. fun fixing it up.

Success.

All

desires gratified, we s a y No but smile at the same time ( t a k i n g a rain c h e c k ) . Blessed are the misers: they shall give what they have to others.

The girls i n

the cities were forced into teams of prostitutes for U.S. troops.

160

Society, not being a

process a king sets in motion, becomes an impersonal place understood and made individual does his actions enliven the Anarchy (no laws or

conventions) in a place that works. Society's individualized.

The doctor

The Saigon

It

attacked everyone differently, wherever a person was vulnerable.

Into that world

when it's changed things'11 reenter we'd renounced, e.g. value judgments (cf. the dominant seventh).

They'll not

monopolize nor suggest what happens next.

It'll be

Details of d a w n

observed, unstudied.

LXXXIX.

every day.

didn't know what the disease was.

Starting over again

for instance) disused.

celebration of ends of lectures, each and

total picture.

immediate mass transportation.

ecology.

Annual

useful so that no matter what each

events foreseen and observed as theatre

(economy, no refuse).

Lectures on

war preferable to war itself.

(He hit over the head the

mother who'd lost her only child, saying, "This will give you something to cry about.") lamentation.

head was struck.) enterprise.

Constant

(We cry because anyone's XC.

Tears: a global President Eisenhower

(1953h Let us assume we lost lndo-China.

If lndo-China goes, the

tin and tungsten we so greatly value

161

would cease coming.

"We are after the

cheapest way to prevent the occurrence of something terrible—the loss of

AFTERWORD

our ability to get what we want from the riches of the Indo-Chinese territory and from Southeast Asia.

If

we get through 1972, Fuller says, we've got it made.

1972 ends the present

critical period.

Following present Not knowing exactly what day a year from Monday—the day eight of us had

trends, fifty per cent of the world's

arranged to meet in Mexico—would be, I decided it was early in June 1967. When

population will then have what they need.

people wrote or called asking me to do something in that month, I said N o .

The other fifty per cent will rapidly join their ranks.

Say by the year 2000.

(Exception: the benefit for the Cunningham Dance Company sponsored by John de Menil to be held at Philip Johnson's home in Connecticut on Saturday, the 3rd of June; Judith Blinken, the Company's and my representative, argued that the first Monday of that month was the 5th: I'd have time to fly.) Then it occurred to me—see the last paragraph of the Foreword—that I was

Each one of us has his own stomach; it is not the stomach of another. Lois Long likes lamb chops. Esther D a m doesn't. Ralph Ferrara prefers the way his aunt cooks mushrooms to the way anybody else does, to wit in olive oil with garlic. As far as I'm concerned they're cooked in butter, salt, and pepper and that's that. (Now and then with the addition of some cream, sometimes sweet, sometimes sour, and less often a little lemon juice.) Once I followed a recipe for stuffed morels under glass. When we got around to eating them we couldn't tell what we were tasting. The dish suggested fancy restaurant food. Henry Cowell told me that years ago in Palo Alto two Stanford botany professors assured him that a mushroom he had

the only one taking the trip to Mexico seriously. I sent a note to Octavio and Mariefound was edible. He ate it and was very ill. Realizing he had eaten other things at the same meal and believing that the teachers knew what they were talking about, he tried the mushroom not once but twice again, becoming seriously sick each time. Charles Mcllvaine was able to eat almost anything, providing it was a fungus. People say he had an iron stomach. We take his remarks about edibility with some skepticism, but his spirit spurs us on. Alexander Smith, obliged as a scientist to taste each new mushroom he finds, is made i l l by almost every one of them. Mushroom poisoning is nothing to laugh about. Nancy Wilson Ross told me of a gardener on Long Island who had always eaten mush-

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rooms he collected, who made a mistake, nearly killing himself by eating one of the amanitas. He recovered and lives but has never been the same since. He is more or less permanently debilitated. I went out in the woods in northern Vermont without any breakfast. (This was about eight years ago.) I began to eat several species raw. Among them was Boletus piperatus, which is said to be edible even though it has pores with red mouths, a danger sign according to many authorities. By noon I was ill, wretchedly so. I was sick for twelve hours. Every now and then I managed to tell the Lippolds, whose guest I was, not to worry, that I wasn't going to die.

Jose in India—see the last lines of the second text on world improvement—asking whether they'd meet me on the 5th in Mexico City: " W i l l that be convenient for you? . . . What a marvelous time we will have!" Paz's reply was two pages long. The first three paragraphs had nothing to do with our rendezvous. The fourth began: "Now about our trip to Mexico. We would not be able to go in June." Farther along: "Our plans are to be in Europe until the 25th of July. . . . Perhaps we can meet afterward in Mexico or in New York. Let me know about your plans. We really want to see you." There were two more paragraphs and a postscript, all to do with other subjects. Now I have other plans—for the rest of the year and also for June. In that month there'll be the annual beach banquet of the New York Mycological Society with Joe Hyde cooking on the beach the wild food members gather along the shore. Also I'll go to Montreal to see the Fuller dome and Jasper Johns' Map of the World According to Buckminster Fuller which is to be in it. The rest of June and

perhaps the summer will be spent working with Dick Higgins and Alison

Knowles on Notations, a book to be published by the Something Else Press which will illustrate the work of some two hundred and sixty composers who have contributed manuscripts to a collection I've been over two years forming to benefit the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts.

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What we have to do, then, is not to say Yes or to say No, but simply to go straight on illiterately, updating the way of life Meister Eckhart proposed

with ever-decreasing resource inputs Fuller calls the greatest act of God.

(just

Under whose leadership? Not that of the financiers (they think in terms of

following the general outlines of the Christian life, "not wondering am I right or

fictitious profit, splitting society into those who have and those who don't). Not

doing something wrong"), following, that is, the general outlines of Buckminster

that of the politicians (they divide up the world and then scheme to obtain power

Fuller's comprehensive design science. There are now six volumes prepared by

for one part at the expense of another). Nor that of the engineers (though Thorstein

Fuller in collaboration with John M c H a l e : Inventory of World Resources, Human

Veblen's proposal, 1921, of a general strike on the part of the engineers followed by

Trends and Needs; The Design Initiative; Comprehensive Thinking; The Ten

their taking control of the country technologically—where it actually 'works'—is

Year Program; World Design Strategy; The Ecological Context: Energy and

attractive). The leadership must be radical, global, architectural.

Materials. These volumes are published by the World Resources Inventory, Box

Architectural in the sense that Buckminster Fuller uses the word: comprehensive

909, Carbondale, Illinois. Fuller's other books are available too: Nine Chains to

design problem-solving. Some years ago I asked Fuller whether he played chess. He

the Moon, No More Secondhand God, Education Automation, Untitled Epic Poem

replied that he used to but now only plays the biggest game. I thought he was re-

on the History of Industrialization (all these are published by the Southern Illinois

ferring to his activities as a lecturer to students throughout the world. I was mistaken.

University Press,

He was referring to his actual game "How to Make the World Work" soon to be set

Carbondale, Illinois); Ideas and Integrities

(Prentice-Hall,

Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey).

up at the University of Southern Illinois. This game, computerized, will be played by

Paz is right. Whether we see one another in Cadaques, Stony Point, Fairport,

capable individuals and teams. The computer will be supplied with all relevant and

Toronto, or New Delhi is of little consequence. We don't have to make plans to be

continually updated information regarding location and quantity of world resources,

together. (Last July, Merce Cunningham and I ran into Bucky Fuller in the airport

world peoples, their trends and needs, world energy systems, etc. The game will be

outside of Madrid.) Circumstances do it for us.

visibly developed on a Dymaxion Airocean World M a p having the size of a football

Changing the world so it works for "livingry" is another matter. Success is

field, a high balcony overlooking it permitting players to see the effect of their

essential. The goal, to quote Fuller as he stated it in '63, is: ". . . to render the total

'moves'; theories of how to "facilitate attainment, at the earliest possible moment,

chemical and energy resources of the world, which are now exclusively preoccupied

by every human being of complete enjoyment of the total planet Earth." B y this

in serving only 44% of humanity, adequate to the service of 100% of humanity at

means, no one will be under anyone's leadership. A n order that serves but does not

higher standards of living and total enjoyment than any man has yet experienced."

control will be discovered by means of the play of intelligence. That order, through

How will the change take place? (Susan McAllester, referring to my proposal —see the third text on world improvement—of a Summit Lecture Series on War,

continued world game tournaments "live-televised by a multi-Telstar relay system" will be made endlessly regenerative.

said, "I thought you were joking.") The change is taking place 'spiritually,'

Recently I visited the National Memorial to the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk,

Marshall McLuhan tells us, without our conscious participation: the media we use

North Carolina. Sixty-four years ago the Wright brothers made the first powered

are effecting the metamorphosis of our minds and bringing us to our senses. It will

flight, remaining in the air twelve seconds or so and traveling a distance of twenty-

be made "definite," Fuller tells us, through intelligent design and implementation

odd feet. I read a statement by Wilbur or Orville: "It is not really necessary to see

thereof on the part of the world's students (unemployed as a result of stepped-up

very far into the future to see how magnificant it will be." A n d then something to

automation, they'll have nothing to do but change the world). "Acts of G o d "

the effect that it's just a question of opening the doors.

sudden cutting-off of necessary services (water, electricity, etc.), sudden i n -

Many doors are now open (they open according to where we give our attention).

sufficiency of this or that resource essential to this or that industry—will bring

Once through, looking back, no wall or doors are seen. Why was anyone for so long

people together in common efforts to recover from crises. The recoveries will be

closed in? Sounds one hears are music. Mushrooms: we see them everywhere even

characterized by the "emergence of ephemeralization" ( F u l l e r ) : doing more with

when we're driving along in the night at forty to sixty miles per hour. The same with

less. That emergencies give men the intelligence to accomplish ever-increasing goals

world improvement: now that we hunt for signs of practical global anarchy, such

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signs appear wherever we look. We see a current use for art: giving instances of society suitable for social imitation—suitable because they show ways many centers can interpenetrate without obstructing one another, ways people can do things without being told or telling others what to do. We look forward to "an environment," N . O. Brown, "that works so well that we can run wild in it." We are evidently going to extremes: to the "very large scale" ("the great impersonality of the world of mass production") and to the "very small scale" ("the possibility of intense personalism") —Edgar Kaufmann Jr., The Architectural Forum, September 1966. We anticipate "the dwindling," the eventual "loss of the middle scale" (Verlust der Mitte—J. Strygowksy): bureaucracies associated with power and profit. The information with which these bureaucracies now deal in a stalemated fashion ( C . Wright Mills: The

smiled and said: There's nothing I disagree with. O n our highways the general speed is in excess of the limit. In supermarkets express check-out lines limited to those having eight or ten items regularly serve customers having more. The burning of draft cards. Haight-Ashbury. Tax evasion. Fourteen thousand Americans renounced citizenship in 1966. Civil disobedience. Non-payment of taxes. July '67 racial riots in New Jersey ended by removal of police from disturbed areas.) We are faced with a problem free of our emotions, a problem so simple computers in their infancy can aid in its solution, a technological problem Fuller long ago stated: to triple the effectiveness and to implement the distribution of world resources so that everyone in the world will have what he needs. Renunciation of competition. World-enlightenment. Not a victory, just something natural.

Power Elite) may be relegated to our computers, our unimaginative rationality put down under as in a sewer—N. O. Brown—so that "the reign of poetry"—Thoreau, Brown, and the rest of us—may at long last commence. Benjamin Franklin's remark doesn't seem silly. He is said to have said: "Gentlemen, you see that in the anarchy in which we live society manages much as before. Take care, if our disputes"—disputes among delegates to the Pennsylvania constitutional convention—"last too long"—they'd already lasted several months—"that the people do not come to think that they can very easily do without us." In the fall of '66, Swedish teachers went on strike. Children, by themselves, proceeded with their own education. A t any point in time, there is a tendency when one 'thinks' about world society to 'think' that things are fixed, cannot change. This non-changeability is imaginary, invented by 'thought' to simplify the process of 'thinking.' But thinking is nowadays complex: it assumes, to begin with, the work of Einstein. Our minds are changing from the use of simple, critical faculties to the use of design, problem-solving, creative faculties, from an unrealistic concern with a non-existent status quo to a courageous seeing of things in movement, life as revolution. History is one revolution after another. "The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual." Thoreau. A n d again Thoreau: "That government is best which governs not at all, and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have." If we 'think' in a fixed, unmoving way about "when men are prepared for it," that "when" will seem unattainably in the future. But we live from day to day: revolution is going on this moment. Once we give our attention to the practice of notbeing-governed we notice that it is increasing. ( A s the conversation began, he

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